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An alert does one useful thing: it lets you stop looking. If you have decided to buy more under a certain price, or to be told when something unusual happens to your wallet, a notification can carry that for you so you are not checking a chart forty times a day. This page covers the free alerts you already have, the one paid service we think is worth knowing about, and a security use that most beginners never hear of.
First, do you need this at all? If you buy a fixed amount on a schedule and plan to hold for years, the honest answer is no. Price alerts are a way of paying attention to the price, and for a long-term saver the healthiest habit is paying less attention, not more. Set up a recurring buy (see How to Buy Bitcoin) and skip to the wallet-watching section, which is useful to everyone who holds their own keys.
The free alerts you already have
Whatever app you bought your bitcoin in will almost certainly tell you when the price crosses a level. These arrive as push notifications on your phone, cost nothing, and need no new account.
- Your exchange app. Kraken has price alerts in Kraken Pro on web, mobile and desktop. Coinbase offers watchlist alerts and custom above-or-below alerts. Look for a bell icon on the bitcoin price screen.
- TradingView. The free plan includes a handful of price alerts (five, when the company last published the figure), which is enough for one person watching one asset.
- Price-tracking apps such as CoinMarketCap’s, which offer alerts once you create an account.
The limits are the same everywhere: push notifications only, which are easy to miss or mute, and nothing that watches a wallet. If a quiet buzz is enough, stop here.
When a paid service earns its keep: Cryptocurrency Alerting
Facts in this section were checked against the company’s own pricing, FAQ, privacy and alert pages on September 20, 2026.
Cryptocurrency Alerting is a small US company, running since 2018, that does nothing but alerts. What it adds over the free options is how it reaches you: besides email, push and browser notifications it can send a text message or place an actual phone call, and it connects to Telegram, Discord and Slack. A phone call at 3 a.m. is hard to sleep through, which is the point. Signing up needs only an email address; the company says it never requires personal information, “not even your name,” and there is no identity check.
The alert types that matter to someone who only holds bitcoin:
- Price alert. Tells you when bitcoin goes above or below a price you choose.
- Periodic price. Sends you the price on a schedule, from every 30 minutes to once a week. A weekly one is a calm replacement for checking.
- Wallet watch. Tells you when a transaction touches a bitcoin address. More on this below.
- Bitcoin mempool. Tells you when the backlog of unconfirmed transactions rises or falls past a size you set. It measures congestion, not the fee rate itself, but a shrinking backlog is a reasonable signal that it is a cheap moment to move coins.
What it costs
| Plan | Price | What you get |
|---|---|---|
| Hobby | Free | Up to 3 active alerts and up to 10 notifications, by email, push, browser, Slack, Telegram, Discord or webhook. No texts or calls. |
| Trader | $7.99 a month, or $47.88 a year | 20 alerts, unlimited notifications on the free channels, and up to 50 texts and 50 phone calls a week in the US and Canada. |
| Pro | $39.99 a month, or $239.88 a year | 120 alerts, 150 texts and 150 calls a week. Far more than one person holding bitcoin needs. |
Be clear-eyed about the free plan. Ten notifications is a trial, not a service: the pricing page does not say the ten ever reset, and at least one app reviewer reports that they do not. The thing that sets this service apart, texts and phone calls, starts at the $7.99 plan. The pricing page shows “$3.99” in large type; that is the yearly plan expressed per month, paid as $47.88 up front, and the company’s FAQ says it does not give refunds.
The downsides
- The company itself says it “cannot offer strict guarantees”: alerts depend on outside data feeds that can have outages. Never let an alert be the only thing standing between you and a loss.
- It is a small team, its privacy policy has not been revised since 2018, and there are few independent reviews (4.5 stars on Apple’s App Store from a few hundred ratings; almost nothing on Trustpilot). One reviewer missed alerts after the phone app logged them out.
- It uses Google Analytics and records your IP address like most websites. See the privacy note on wallet watching below.
That button is our referral link. If you later pay for a plan, the company pays us 20% of your subscription; you pay the same price either way and get no discount for using it. This is education, not financial advice.
The security use: watch your own wallet
If you keep bitcoin in a wallet you control, especially a hardware wallet you rarely touch, its balance should never change unless you change it. A wallet-watch alert on your own address turns that into an alarm: if coins ever move and you did not move them, you find out within minutes instead of months. It cannot stop a theft, but it tells you at once that a recovery phrase has been compromised, so you can move whatever remains in your other wallets. It also confirms that a deposit you are expecting has arrived without you opening the wallet at all.
You give the service a public address, the same thing you would give someone to pay you. You never give it a recovery phrase or private key, and Cryptocurrency Alerting states plainly: “We will never ask you for your private key.” Anything that asks for those words is a scam; see Avoiding Bitcoin Scams.
The privacy trade-off. Bitcoin addresses are public, but nobody knows which ones are yours. Once you ask a company to watch an address, that company can connect the address to your email and the IP address you signed up from, and its privacy policy says nothing specific about how watched addresses are handled. If that matters to you, use an email address you use for nothing else, and watch only the wallet you care most about. The privacy-preserving alternative is a watch-only wallet on your own phone, which shows a balance without holding the keys; Wallets and Self-Custody explains the idea.
Setting sensible alerts
- Decide the action before you set the alert. “If bitcoin falls below this, I buy $200 more” is a plan. “Tell me if it drops” is an invitation to panic.
- Set few, and set them far apart. Two or three levels that would genuinely change what you do. Bitcoin moves several percent on an ordinary day; an alert that fires daily teaches you to ignore alerts.
- Use the cooldown. Most services let you limit how often one alert can fire, so a price hovering around your level does not buzz you twenty times.
- Treat every alert about your account with suspicion. A text saying “unusual activity, tap here” is the oldest phishing message there is. Real alerts tell you something; they never ask you to log in through a link.
Next
- Keeping Your Bitcoin Safe: the account protections that matter more than any alert.
- Avoiding Bitcoin Scams: including the fake “security alert.”
- Wallets and Self-Custody: what an address is, and what a watch-only wallet does.