Ticket price trackers and alerts: how to know when prices drop

Ticket price alerts built into each marketplace

Most ticket apps can alert you, but not all of them alert on price; some only tell you about new dates. This is what each one offers, from its own help pages and app listings, checked on 10 October 2026:

If you buy on one marketplace, its own alert is the simplest ticket price tracker you can use. TickPick's is the most complete of the group: it alerts on drops, keeps the price history, and through Price Freeze credits you up to $25 a ticket if the price climbs instead.

Track ticket prices across several sites

A marketplace's alert only watches its own listings. If you buy wherever the price is lowest, a cross-site ticket price tracker saves you checking each app:

One caution before you compare numbers: StubHub picks each visitor's fee from a fixed set using an anonymous browser cookie, so two people can see different totals for the same ticket at the same moment. Treat any tracker's price as a guide, and the checkout page as the price.

Set a ticket price drop alert with Website Change Tracker

TickPick puts each event's cheapest price in the page's HTML, which is what our checker reads. On the evening of 10 October 2026, its Jets vs. Browns page for MetLife Stadium read 'Prices for Cleveland Browns at New York Jets tickets at MetLife Stadium on Sunday, October 11, 2026 start at $34.', and a check later that evening read $33. Concert pages work the same way: the page for Usher and Chris Brown at MetLife Stadium on 15 October said tickets 'start at $72'.

1. 1Open the event on TickPick and copy the page address.
2. 2Create an account and add it as a page to monitor.
3. 3Write the rule as the price you would pay, for example 'tell me when tickets start under $30'. A plain-English rule sends the alert when the price crosses your number and holds back changes that don't match it.
4. 4Check hourly on Starter while the event is weeks away. In the final days, when sellers with unsold seats cut hardest, check every 5 minutes on Pro.
5. 5Send the alert where you will see it first: email on every plan, or a Slack channel or webhook from Starter.

Each event is one page on your plan, so Starter's 50 pages cover an NFL team's home games with room to spare. A Vivid Seats team page we checked also listed a price for each game as text, so a rule that names the game, such as 'tell me when the game on 25 October is under $60', can watch it too. The same kind of rule tracks a price on any shop page whose price is in its HTML: see how to track price changes on any website.

How to track StubHub, SeatGeek and Ticketmaster prices

Not with a page monitor that reads HTML, ours included. These marketplaces build their listings in the browser or turn automated visitors away: on 10 October 2026, StubHub and SeatGeek answered our checker with an HTTP 403 and the message 'Please enable JS and disable any ad blocker', and Ticketmaster refused it on an event page.

Use a cross-site tracker instead. EventSpy watches all three, plus TickPick. SeatGeek and Ticketmaster have no price drop alert of their own that we could verify, and StubHub documents one in its UK app that we could not confirm in the US app.

When ticket prices drop

Resale prices move with demand. For most events they fall as the date gets closer, because sellers would rather take less than be left holding a ticket. For the hottest events they can rise instead. The published evidence:

• Sellers of 2007 Major League Baseball tickets on StubHub and eBay cut their prices by 40% or more as game day approached, in an economist's study of more than 178,000 eBay listings and millions on StubHub (Sweeting, Journal of Political Economy, 2012).
• Gametime's data put the median NBA ticket at $127 two days before tip-off and $40 an hour and a half after it.
• StubHub says events with weak demand drop most in the final 48 hours, and TickPick says concert prices can fall near showtime, but not reliably.
• Popular shows can go the other way. TicketData measured Ariana Grande prices up 43% after Ticketmaster began cancelling some of her tour's orders on 13 October 2025, and SeatPick told Rolling Stone that the day-of median for some top events reached 99% of the peak.
• For the 2024 Super Bowl, TickPick found the best time to buy was about seven days out.

No rule of thumb tells you when your event will drop, which is the case for an alert at your own price: the first check after the price crosses your number sends it, whenever that turns out to be.

How dynamic pricing and the FTC fee rule change the price you see

Ticketmaster prices can move after a sale opens. In a January 2026 submission to Canada's Competition Bureau, Ticketmaster explained that organizers can change prices after tickets go on sale, that the changes are made by people, most often cuts when an event has not sold out, and that big shows now have 10 to 30 price levels against 3 or 4 fifteen years ago. When the cheapest levels sell out, prices look as if they have gone up. Official Platinum seats are priced by the event organizer, and Ticketmaster says it does not use algorithmic surge pricing for them.

Since 12 May 2025, the FTC's rule on unfair or deceptive fees has required anyone selling live-event tickets in the US, resale sites included, to make the headline price include every mandatory fee. Only government charges, shipping and optional extras can be left out, and they must be shown before you pay. In April 2026 StubHub agreed to refund $10 million in fees over the prices it showed from 12 to 14 May 2025, the rule's first three days.

The price on a ticket page now includes the fees, so comparing sites is fairer than it used to be. Ticketmaster shows prices with fees included, before tax, and StubHub's fee can still differ from one visitor to the next.

Get an alert when new shows and presales are announced

Price alerts only help once an event is on sale. To hear about new dates and presales first, Ticketmaster's own advice is to favorite the artist, sign up on the artist's site, join fan clubs and subscribe to venue newsletters. High-demand tours use Verified Fan: you register on the tour's page, and when demand exceeds supply a lottery picks who gets an access code by text, while everyone else goes on a waitlist.

A page monitor covers the pages nobody emails you about. Many venue calendars are plain HTML: Red Rocks Amphitheatre's and the Ryman Auditorium's events pages were both readable to our checker on 10 October 2026. Monitor them with a rule like 'tell me when a new show is added', checked daily on Basic. Artist tour pages vary. Coldplay's loads its dates with a script and showed none to our checker, so for an artist like that, watch the venues instead. How to get notified when a website is updated covers rules for new listings in more detail.

Which plan you need for ticket price alerts

Check frequency decides how soon you hear about a drop. Weeks out, hourly checks are plenty; in the final days, when sellers cut hardest, 5-minute checks hear about a drop sooner.

Billed yearly, Basic is $4 a month, Starter $24 and Pro $120. If you only ever buy on one marketplace, its own free alert is the better deal. Use Website Change Tracker when you want your own price rule on TickPick pages, or venue calendars watched for new shows, next to everything else you monitor. See pricing for every plan.