A Telegram bot that watches kolesa.kz for you. Build a search through inline-keyboard prompts — make, model, city, generation, price range, year range — and the bot pings you the moment a new listing posts. Bilingual Kazakh and Russian, runs continuously, only ever forwards ads created after your search was saved.
Kolesa.kz is the place Kazakhstan goes to buy and sell used cars — and the good listings get snapped up within hours of going live. Refreshing the search page on your phone every twenty minutes is no way to live. The brief was simple: a Telegram bot that watches the site for you and pings you the second something matching your query appears. No app to install, no email digest, no daily round-up — a single message in a chat you already check fifty times a day.
The whole flow lives inside Telegram. /start picks the language — Kazakh or Russian. /add walks you through the request as a chain of inline-keyboard prompts: make from a paged list of every brand on kolesa.kz, then model in the same way, then city, then generation if the model has them, then a price range in tenge and a year range as plain ranges. Finish, and the bot saves the query and tells you immediately how many ads currently match — so you have a baseline before notifications start arriving. /list shows your active searches, /remove deletes one, and you can pause a search without deleting it and bring it back later.
The watcher is a small Node.js service that polls kolesa.kz at a polite cadence per saved query, normalises each listing into a stable identifier, deduplicates against a Postgres set of seen IDs per query, and pushes only the genuinely-new entries to the bot. We tuned the schedule per query against marketplace rate limits — popular brand × city combinations get re-scanned every few minutes; sparse combinations every hour. A typical user has three to five searches running in parallel — "Land Cruiser in Almaty, 8M–12M ₸, 2002–2006" alongside "Lexus RX anywhere, ≤14M ₸, post-2018" — and gets a steady trickle of fresh listings throughout the day.
Each notification is a single message: title, price, year, city, and a deep link to the ad on kolesa.kz. No noise, no banners, no daily digest. One ad, one message, the moment it appears. The bot has been running continuously since launch and currently watches several hundred saved searches across its user base; the marginal cost of adding a user is essentially zero, which is what makes the model work — and what makes the bot a quiet, durable utility rather than another app you forget about after a week.