Add a "price change history" to Latvia's biggest classifieds site: one Reddit post, 313 users

AdSnap is a free Chrome extension that only works on ss.lv. Open a listing for a used car or a flat and a small strip appears above the photos: how many times the price changed, how far it dropped in total, and when it last changed. It's built by a small classifieds site trying to take business from ss.lv, and the extension is its hook for traffic. It launched in Sep 19, a single r/latvia post brought in more than half its users, and by Nov 6 it had 313 users in total. The numbers are small, but the playbook is complete: collect data first, embed the extension, post on local forums, and iterate on the comments. Worth a read.

"I think the top comment is wrong"

In Oct 14 2026, Viktors Telle, a developer in Riga, wrote this on LinkedIn:

I've been logging car prices on ss.lv since late May. ss.lv only shows you today's price. I wanted to know whether a car had been listed for months or whether the seller had just dropped the price last week, and there was no way to tell. So I built a Chrome extension that shows the price history right on the listing. Three weeks ago I posted it on r/latvia. It got 275 upvotes and 42 comments, and I read every one.

A top comment said he had it wrong: sellers on ss.lv delete and repost their listing when they change the price, so his history misses most of the changes. He didn't believe it, went back through his data, and found that most price changes did happen on the same listing, but 5% to 18% were exactly what the commenter described. That became his next feature. Then came property, the second most requested thing in the comments, and then a feature for sellers, which he had promised in a reply on day one.

"242 people are using it now. I know, the number isn't big."

What it is

ss.lv is Latvia's classifieds site, and nearly all used-car buying and renting or buying property happens there. It has one gap everyone knows about: it shows only the current price, not the history. What buyers want to know is exactly how long a car has been listed and whether the price has come down. A car that has been up for weeks and keeps getting refreshed usually means a seller who will negotiate.

The AdSnap extension does exactly this (adsnap.lv extension page, 11-06):

• A small strip above the listing: how much the price has changed since tracking started, how many times it changed, and when it last changed. If it hasn't changed, it says "tracked since [date], no changes". Rentals show as "−50 €/month".
• A "full price history" button: takes you to adsnap.lv, where you can see every price and date, how many days it has been listed, how many times it was refreshed, the typical price for the same model, year and fuel type, and how far this car sits above or below it.
• Price-drop alerts: set a price you'd pay and get an email when it drops to that level. If the seller deletes and reposts, the alert follows the new listing. An AdSnap account is required. Free accounts can watch 1 listings for 60 days, and the watch can be renewed.
• For sellers: when you list on ss.lv, a box under the price shows the typical price for similar cars and the price range that half of them fall in. A "post to adsnap.lv too" button copies the model, price, text, city and photos across.

It also states plainly that the extension only records a listing when it appears in the ss.lv feed or gets refreshed, so a price change between two refreshes won't show until the next one, and "no changes" means "we saw no changes".

The extension is free and sells nothing. It has a rating of 5.0 on the Chrome Web Store from 5 reviews, and it is available in Latvian, Russian and English.

How users came in

One Reddit post drove most of the growth. Third-party extension stats show it had only 2 users in Sep 20, and 177 by Oct 4. The r/latvia post with 275 upvotes falls right in between. Latvia has about 1.9M people, and in a community that small, 275 upvotes is top-of-feed exposure.

Then it went back to Reddit for every feature. In Oct 6, the same account posted on r/latvia again: "Two weeks ago I posted an extension here that shows the ss.lv car price history. You asked for property price history in the comments, and for prices that stay visible after a relist. Both are now added." Bytes Europe, a European tech aggregator, picked up the post. Seller features (10-12) and price-drop alerts (around 10-28) followed the same pattern: use the community's comments as a roadmap, ship, then post back.

Driving traffic to its own site. adsnap.lv has a banner across the top of every page promoting the extension. It also has a web page where you paste a listing link to see its price history, with no install, no sign-up, and it works on mobile. For the search "ss.lv cenu vēsture" (ss.lv price history), that page already ranks on the first page.

Blog posts built on platform data. "Which cars in Latvia depreciate fastest" (based on about 110k ss.lv listings), "why ss.lv deletes your listing", "where to sell your car after ss.lv closed new user sign-ups", "how much a Latvian classifieds site earned in 2025 years". Each one captures traffic from people frustrated with ss.lv.

Everything else is small. The founder's two LinkedIn posts, the later one with 12 likes. The TikTok account @adsnap.lv has 174 followers. There have been a few extension promotion posts on Facebook. No paid ads, influencer deals or press coverage found.

Growth has slowed since then: Chrome Web Store users are at 11-01 295,11-04 306,11-06 313, about ten a week.

Why this one, not the ones already out there

"ss.lv price history" isn't a new need. At least three sites and three extensions have tried it locally:

It doesn't win on data depth. It wins because it has three things at once: it's embedded right in ss.lv listing pages, it covers cars, and it's still being updated. The website makes you copy a link and go somewhere else, and the older extensions either only cover real estate or have stopped updating. The Reddit post's pitch was "see it right on the listing."

Two more reasons: it started collecting data in May, so when the extension launched in September each listing already had about 4 months of history, and there was something to look at the first time you installed it. And ss.lv had just closed new user sign-ups and was deleting listings often. Plenty of complaints about it on r/latvia, so a tool built against ss.lv had people rooting for it from the start.

Where the money is

Nothing in the extension. The money (if any) is at adsnap.lv: a free, trilingual classifieds site trying to challenge ss.lv. The extension gives buyers price history and asks them to sign up for alerts. It gives sellers a typical-price reference and then, with one click, moves their listing over to adsnap.lv. Basically, it borrows ss.lv's traffic to pull sellers and sign-ups to its own classifieds site. The "move supply over" step is something none of the competing pure-data tools do.

"Free to watch 1 listings for 60 days" looks like groundwork for charging by listing count later. Neither the website nor the store has a pricing page yet (inferred, not verified). How many listings adsnap.lv has, and how many cross-posts the extension has sent over, can't be seen from outside.

Risks

The barrier is low. The data comes from scraping public listing feeds, and at least three or four local players are already scraping. The extension shell can be written in a few days. The bigger variable is ss.lv: the extension injects content into its pages and moves sellers toward a competitor, so ss.lv could block it or change its layout on a whim. AdSnap states on its about page that it is "not affiliated with ss.lv or SIA "SS"."

If it were you

Bottom line: what you can learn is the playbook, not this product. Building another one on ss.lv makes no sense. Copying the approach for a dominant classifieds site in another country is doable, but a single small country caps out at maybe a few hundred to a few thousand users, and the extension itself doesn't make money. It's only worth the effort if you have a site behind it that needs supply, or plan to sell paid alerts.

Who it suits: people already working in used cars, real estate or content in a given country who want a cheap acquisition hook, and developers who can write scrapers and extensions and can wait a few months quietly collecting data before anything shows.

Who it doesn't suit: anyone counting on the extension itself for subscription revenue, anyone who doesn't speak the local language or can't get into local forums, and anyone worried about platform bans or legal letters.

How to do it: first pick a site: a classifieds site with overwhelming dominance in its country that only shows current prices (cars and real estate work best). Search the Chrome store for a price-history extension that's still being updated. If one exists, move on to the next site. Candidates include OLX (Poland, Romania, Portugal), Otomoto, Autoplius, Auto24, Sahibinden, Leboncoin and Kijiji. Many countries already have a website version, but one that is embedded in the page, covers cars, and is actively maintained is rare. Scrape for two or three months and build up history before launching. The extension should only cover "how many times it changed, how much it dropped, how long it's been up"; full history and alerts go on your own site behind a sign-up. Detecting deleted-and-reposted listings has to be handled eventually. AdSnap's data shows 5% to 18% of price changes happen this way.

How to get users: copy it. Post a first-person "I built this" on the local subreddit or the biggest car and property forum. Reply to every comment, ship the two or three most-requested features within two weeks, then come back with an update post. Meanwhile, use the data you've collected to write things like "which car models depreciate fastest" for search and social content.

When to move: no specific date. But once the site you picked builds price history itself, or a local rival's extension starts getting updates, the gap closes.

Signs you've misread it: ① less than two weeks after posting, only 100 users, which means locals don't care much about price history or you're in the wrong communities; ② users grow, but nobody signs up for alerts and nobody clicks "send to your site," which means the extension can't act as an acquisition channel and is just a handy free tool; ③ the platform redesigns, adds anti-scraping measures, or sends a legal letter, and the extension drops to zero overnight.