Get told the moment it hits your price.
You have a number in your head — BTC at 100k, your alt back at break-even — and you don't want to watch charts until it prints. There are exactly five ways to get notified when a coin hits a price. Here they all are, with the real limits of each, so you can pick in two minutes.
The five routes, side by side
| COST | WHERE IT PINGS YOU | THE CATCH | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Exchange app (Binance, Coinbase…) | Free | That app's push only | Caps and expiry — Binance: 10/pair, 50 total, 90-day expiry. Verified account required, one exchange only. |
| CoinMarketCap / CoinGecko apps | Free | Their app's push | Index prices averaged across exchanges — not the number on any order book you trade. |
| TradingView | Free tier → $14.95–$239.95/mo | App, email; webhooks on paid | Free plan: 3 price alerts, and alerts below Premium expire after 2 months. |
| Dedicated alert service | Usually paid | Telegram, Discord, Slack, email, webhooks | Costs money. That's roughly it — alerting is the entire product, so the limits go away. |
| DIY bot (Python/n8n) | Your time + a server | Whatever you wire up | You're now running infrastructure: API keys, uptime, retries, maintenance forever. |
1 — Your exchange's app
Right answer for one or two levels on an exchange you already use. The limits are real, though: Binance caps you at 10 alerts per pair and 50 total, and every alert silently expires after 90 days — we wrote a whole guide on those limits. Coinbase keeps price alerts in its mobile app. All of them ping only their own app, on only their own listings, behind a verified account.
2 — CoinMarketCap or CoinGecko
Free and covering virtually every coin that exists. The catch is what price they watch: an index averaged across exchanges. If your alert exists to trigger an action on a specific exchange, the index can cross while your order book hasn't — or the reverse.
3 — TradingView
Superb if you live in charts and want alerts on indicators, not just prices. As a pure price-alert tool it's expensive: the free plan allows 3 price alerts and everything below Premium ($69.95/mo) expires after two months. Full comparison here.
4 — A dedicated alert service
Alerting as the whole product: multi-exchange coverage, every messaging channel, no caps designed to push you back into an app. This is coinsentry's category — 13,000+ pairs across 13 exchanges, median 2.8s from price cross to notification, delivered to Telegram, Discord, Slack, email or webhooks, with no exchange account connection. We compared the whole category honestly, ourselves included.
5 — Build a bot
Entirely doable and genuinely fun once. You'll maintain it forever, and it fails silently at 3am. The honest cost breakdown got its own guide.
Which price are you actually watching?
Two alerts "at $100,000" can fire minutes apart, because they watch different numbers. An exchange feed is a real order book — the price you can actually trade at, there. An index is an average across many exchanges — smoother, but not tradeable anywhere. Neither is wrong; they answer different questions.
A price alert in the next three minutes
- 01Pick the pair
Search any of 13,000+ pairs across 13 exchanges — majors to fresh listings, each pinned to its exchange's real feed.
- 02Set the level
The exact price that matters. One-shot, or re-arming after the price moves away — your choice per alert.
- 03Choose the ping
Telegram, Discord, Slack, email or webhook — any mix. Median 2.8 seconds after the cross.
Fair questions, straight answers
A dedicated alert service watching the exchange feed directly. coinsentry delivers a median 2.8 seconds after the price crosses your level — exchange apps are comparable when push works, free portfolio trackers and email-first services are noticeably slower.
Yes. Dedicated services read public market prices, so no exchange account, login or API keys are needed. Exchange-native alerts, by contrast, require a verified account on that exchange.
It varies, and it matters. Exchange apps use their own feed. Many trackers use an index averaged across exchanges — which can differ from any real order book by enough to fire early or late. coinsentry pins every alert to one named exchange's feed.
Exchange apps generally can't — Binance is app and desktop push only. Dedicated services can: coinsentry delivers to Telegram, Discord, Slack, email and webhooks — email + private Telegram on the free plan, all five on Unlimited.
Free options exist with real caps: exchange apps (capped, account required), CoinMarketCap/CoinGecko apps (index prices), TradingView's free plan (3 price alerts, 2-month expiry), coinsentry's free plan (10 price alerts plus listing and delisting alerts on 1 exchange and 3 watched coins, to email and private Telegram, no expiry). Uncapped multi-channel alerting is paid — coinsentry is $7.99/mo, and every account starts with a 30-day unlimited trial.