DockSnipe watches Facebook Marketplace for boats and sends what it finds to Telegram. That is the whole product. This page covers who makes it, how it actually works, and the standards the buying guides are held to, because a site that tells you whether to spend five figures on a used boat should say where its advice comes from.
What DockSnipe is
DockSnipe is one of the Snipe family. All of the brands run on the same browser extension and the same engine, with a separate hunt and a separate Telegram bot for each thing worth chasing: CarSnipe for cars and trucks, DockSnipe for boats and trailers. One extension, one login, two chats that stay out of each other's way.
The engine sweeps Marketplace every 3 minutes on Pro and every 15 minutes on Basic, using the Facebook session already open in your own browser. Across the family it has delivered 15,000+ alerts to 355+ paired accounts. Those are family-wide totals covering cars as well as boats, and we label them that way everywhere they appear rather than implying the boats side is bigger than it is.
How it works, plainly
- It runs in your browser, not on our servers. The extension reads Marketplace on the session you are already logged into. You never hand over a Facebook password, and there is no separate account for us to leak.
- It reads only what is public on the listing. Title text, description, price, location, photos. The same things you would read.
- It pulls out the facts that decide a boat. Engine and hours where stated, trailer, title status, and the seller phrases that change the maths.
- It sends the flags in both directions. Red and green, on every alert, including boats it scores well. A tool that only reports good news is one you stop trusting in week two.
What it deliberately does not do
Three things, on purpose.
- It does not tell you what a boat is worth. Nobody can value a used boat from a listing, and a confident number would be a made-up number. You get a soft read plus every fact we pulled, and the appraisal stays your job.
- It does not buy, bid, message or negotiate. It finds and it reports. What you do next is yours.
- It is not limited to one region. It works anywhere Facebook Marketplace runs, in whatever radius you set. Where a guide uses a state as an example, that is an example, not the scope.
How the guides get written
The guides exist because the alert is only half the job: knowing a boat has been listed is worth nothing if you cannot tell a $600 problem from a $16,000 one. They follow four rules.
- Numbers carry their source. Where a guide states a regulation, a measurement or a specification, it links to the primary source so you can read it yourself, whether that is the Coast Guard's hull identification rules or a state boating agency's own titling page.
- Cost figures say what they are. Repair ranges are typical US marine shop quotes and parts pricing at the time of writing, and they say so on the page. Labor rates move a long way between markets, so they are there to sanity-check a listing, not to quote a job.
- Rules of thumb are labeled as rules of thumb. "Consistent compression across cylinders" is a principle. A precise pass/fail number would depend on the engine, so we do not invent one.
- Nothing is written to sell the product. The guides tell you to walk away from boats, which is the opposite of what an alert service benefits from in the short term, and the correct advice.
The guides are published by DockSnipe rather than under an individual byline, and each one carries a publication and last-updated date. Where a guide is revised, the content changes with the date: we do not touch a timestamp to look fresh.
Affiliate links and how we handle them
Some guides link to tools worth carrying to a viewing, such as a compression tester or a moisture meter, and those links are Amazon affiliate links: if you buy through one, we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. Three rules go with that. The disclosure appears above the first link on any page that has one. No product is recommended that does not belong in the job the guide describes. And we never state a price or a rating in the text, because both move, which is why the guides tell you to check the current price yourself.
Privacy, in one paragraph
The extension runs locally and reads public listing content. We do not want your Facebook credentials and have nowhere to put them. The full detail, including what the Telegram bot stores and how to delete it, is in the privacy policy, and the terms of service are here.
Getting hold of us
Email support@docksnipe.com, or message @DockSnipeBot directly. Corrections to a guide are genuinely welcome: if something on this site is wrong, we would rather hear it from you than leave it up.