Review Insights · App Store
HotStock - in-stock alerts
Litebox Ltd · 14,463 ratings · ★ 4.7
4.7
★★★★★
14,463 ratings
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Top complaints - extracted from 24 negative reviews
Recurring phrases mined from 1-2★ reviews. The bigger the percentage, the more users have the same problem. Fix the top 2-3 in your version and you have product-market fit on day one.
1
"doesn"
11 negative reviews mention this · 46% of all complaints
★★★★★ "Doesn’t actually work. Paid for the membership and everytime the item stocks it can’t auto buy for me and sells out. What a waste" - Jdjdjdksjs
2
"work"
10 negative reviews mention this · 42% of all complaints
★★★★★ "Doesn’t actually work. Paid for the membership and everytime the item stocks it can’t auto buy for me and sells out. What a waste" - Jdjdjdksjs
3
"auto"
9 negative reviews mention this · 38% of all complaints
★★★★★ "Doesn’t actually work. Paid for the membership and everytime the item stocks it can’t auto buy for me and sells out. What a waste" - Jdjdjdksjs
4
"money"
8 negative reviews mention this · 33% of all complaints
★★★★★ "Don’t waste your money. Tried this app and wasted $10.99 for the monthly service. Not once has it worked. Save your money and try something else. This is a waste of time and money." - MominOregon3
5
"doesn work"
8 negative reviews mention this · 33% of all complaints
6
"waste"
7 negative reviews mention this · 29% of all complaints
★★★★★ "Doesn’t actually work. Paid for the membership and everytime the item stocks it can’t auto buy for me and sells out. What a waste" - Jdjdjdksjs
7
"premium"
6 negative reviews mention this · 25% of all complaints
★★★★★ "Waste of Money - Premium Does not work. Don’t waste your time or money on the premium service! I purchased this app thinking I could use it to AutoBuy Pokemon cards and other electronics that I wanted that are in high demand. I paid $10.99 and it was NOT worth it. Every time some…" - BGLP
8
"subscription"
6 negative reviews mention this · 25% of all complaints
★★★★★ "Waste of Money - Premium Does not work. Don’t waste your time or money on the premium service! I purchased this app thinking I could use it to AutoBuy Pokemon cards and other electronics that I wanted that are in high demand. I paid $10.99 and it was NOT worth it. Every time some…" - BGLP
9
"times"
6 negative reviews mention this · 25% of all complaints
★★★★★ "Auto buy is a complete scam. If you believe this app will help you secure Pokemon while you sleep you need to keep dreaming. First it gets stuck in the Walmart ques and times out. Best Buy sells mainly by invite. It can not even try Costco or Sam’s. A,a on is only …" - Auto buy is a scam
10
"notifications"
6 negative reviews mention this · 25% of all complaints
★★★★★ "Doesn’t work. Apparently it only works if you have the app pulled up on your screen. Autobuy hasnt worked once for me and seems to not even attempted still. I also haven’t gotten any notifications. I use TrackaLacker also and it notifies me all day, I’ve…" - Puddin345
11
"item"
5 negative reviews mention this · 21% of all complaints
★★★★★ "Doesn’t actually work. Paid for the membership and everytime the item stocks it can’t auto buy for me and sells out. What a waste" - Jdjdjdksjs
12
"once"
5 negative reviews mention this · 21% of all complaints
★★★★★ "Don’t waste your money. Tried this app and wasted $10.99 for the monthly service. Not once has it worked. Save your money and try something else. This is a waste of time and money." - MominOregon3
📋 All 24 negative reviews
Every 1-2★ review we fetched. Use the copy button to grab them all for your own analysis (paste into ChatGPT/Claude with a prompt like "summarize core user problems, group by theme, ignore bugs, focus on missing features").
Doesn’t actually work
Paid for the membership and everytime the item stocks it can’t auto buy for me and sells out. What a waste
Don’t waste your money
Tried this app and wasted $10.99 for the monthly service. Not once has it worked. Save your money and try something else. This is a waste of time and money.
Waste of Money - Premium Does not work
Don’t waste your time or money on the premium service! I purchased this app thinking I could use it to AutoBuy Pokemon cards and other electronics that I wanted that are in high demand. I paid $10.99 and it was NOT worth it. Every time something becomes available it says the autobuy feature was not able to purchase because of low stock. Isn’t that the reason I paid for your subscription? I’ve been running my phone 24/7 over the past week and haven’t got any of the 20+ drops. Not to mention all the other technical issues I’ve had. What a total disappointment. Wish I could get a refund.
Notificaciones falsas
Todos los días me llega que el producto que quiero está disponible entro al segundo que me lo dice y sale que no lo tienen disponible, que mal app
Doesn’t work and inexistent CS
I bought their upgraded auto buy membership and it never allowed me to connect my Best Buy account. I reached out to their email and sent to with no reply from them. I will be doing a charge back with my bank. I do not recommend you purchase their services because you don’t actually get anything.
Garbage
Used to be decent, trash and unreliable now.
Auto buy is a complete scam
If you believe this app will help you secure Pokemon while you sleep you need to keep dreaming. First it gets stuck in the Walmart ques and times out. Best Buy sells mainly by invite. It can not even try Costco or Sam’s. A,a on is only third party sales. That leaves target which drops in the middle of the night. Perfect you might think but not a chance. Save your money and time. I also forgot to mention you device has to be on and with HotStock running on the screen to even try.
Autobuy
Waste of money doesn’t work at all keep missing the sale it’s a scam
Useless unless you want to pay
Absolutely useless app unless you want to pay for premium. Basic members get alerts 24 hours late at which point everything is already sold out.
Doesn’t work
Apparently it only works if you have the app pulled up on your screen. Autobuy hasnt worked once for me and seems to not even attempted still. I also haven’t gotten any notifications. I use TrackaLacker also and it notifies me all day, I’ve even scored a few times, this one should at least be notifying me when TrackaLacker does
Bad app
I tried it when I wanted to get a video card and I never got a chance to purchase it through that app even with premium subscription and then I completely forgot but I setup auth on it to let it buy on bestbuy which just locked out of my account and now I can’t access it
auto buy doesn’t work
auto buy is a waste of money!!!! had the app open for 3 weeks and every time item comes in stock it doesn’t work and says try again. worthless!!!
Terrible!
This app is useless. Don’t waste your money.
Wasted Money - No Response from Support
I’m very disappointed with my subscription to HotStock. If the item is already in their system, it works well-but getting a new item added is extremely difficult. I’ve sent multiple emails with links and never received a response. You also can’t check whether an item is available to track before subscribing, so you end up paying without knowing if the app will even help. I wasted money trying to track an item that was never added. Would not recommend subscribing.
Auto buy Doesn’t work
Paid for auto buy item came back in stock several times hasn’t worked once while I leave my iPad on 24/7 with everything set up
Terrible app
Absolutely terrible app you have to pay for a subscription to get any notifications or anything. A lot of other apps do it for free and a lot better
Great App!!
Got my camera I wanted!!! I got notifications so fast! I did miss out on the item a few times but nevertheless, happy with this app
Doesn’t work
Didn’t fire an alert once for the entire month I had a premium membership despite a discord I was using to track the same product sending notifications 3-4 times a week. Found the drop I wanted through the discord and Distill running on my desktop 24/7 instead; don’t waste your time with this app.
Unbelievable how useless free version is
The fact that you can only add one, just one customer alert before prompt you for pay to play version. Not only auto pay, which I would get no you can’t even add more than one product without purchasing it. Completely useless don’t do it unless you want to pay for it.
Don’t pay for the auto buy
4 weeks and it’s got me absolutely nothing. It’s trash for target and always needs you to sign back in mid restock. It can’t get a single thing on Amazon always says “low stock unable to buy” yet I was able to buy it myself. It does alert me before my Reddit group but that’s about all it’s worth.
So far, brutally ineffective, even with premium
Educated guess: 80% or more find the app based on a viral product. When you pay for the subscription alone, if you haven’t been first - others are using a better service. But what’s worse is, when you premium pay for autobuy and it still doesn’t work, there’s a bigger issue. 2 stars simply because it usually flushes out the 1 star outliers.
Will change the rating if something changes with the service.
Will change the rating if something changes with the service.
IDK
Good app kinda leans you it I buying the premium service of getting faster restocks, IDK if it’s just my end of things but I can’t even search for stuff anymore without the add for switching to premium pops up and when I close the add it doesn’t keep my search. Was goated app before then
Used to be better ($10 sub)
I used to subscribe and was able to get about 3 items over the course of a month. Leaving the app open almost 18 hours a day for auto buy. So already not great but worked kind of. Now I’ve had the subscription for a couple days and have maybe gotten 2 notifications of items restocking. I think either the bot is slower than all of the scalper bots or it just doesn’t try.
I understand that pokemon is a crazy popular product but I have 37 items being watched and none of them are pinging (even though they’re being released multiple times a day).
The app constantly turns itself off when trying to implement new info. It is also very good at notifying you it isn’t open though. Extremely annoying especially when it closed itself. Also running into a problem where it has me log in over and over but won’t stay logged into my Walmart account.
I understand that pokemon is a crazy popular product but I have 37 items being watched and none of them are pinging (even though they’re being released multiple times a day).
The app constantly turns itself off when trying to implement new info. It is also very good at notifying you it isn’t open though. Extremely annoying especially when it closed itself. Also running into a problem where it has me log in over and over but won’t stay logged into my Walmart account.
This App Cannot Compete with Bots
2 stars for notification feature actually working. Otherwise it would be 1 star, for incapability of doing the feature it claims to be able to do.
After using this app for going on 2 weeks now, and even using a dedicated device to run the app in the foreground most of the day, I can say with confidence it doesn’t seem to work very well with Target.
I cannot speak for the use for other sites/stores, but it simply cannot keep up with bots buying out stock. Every few attempts, the app suddenly requires me to re-login during the auto-but checkout process…. Literally having to enter login information DURING checkout slows down the potential to compete with bots buying items. It also seems to stop somewhere toward the end of the checkout process and has a hard time completing the transaction.
The only use seems to be getting notifications that items are in stock. I am more often more successful with beating a bot myself, by acting once I see a restock notification, than relying on the auto features of the app. Otherwise, the auto-buy feature is not worth spending money on.
After using this app for going on 2 weeks now, and even using a dedicated device to run the app in the foreground most of the day, I can say with confidence it doesn’t seem to work very well with Target.
I cannot speak for the use for other sites/stores, but it simply cannot keep up with bots buying out stock. Every few attempts, the app suddenly requires me to re-login during the auto-but checkout process…. Literally having to enter login information DURING checkout slows down the potential to compete with bots buying items. It also seems to stop somewhere toward the end of the checkout process and has a hard time completing the transaction.
The only use seems to be getting notifications that items are in stock. I am more often more successful with beating a bot myself, by acting once I see a restock notification, than relying on the auto features of the app. Otherwise, the auto-buy feature is not worth spending money on.
Sentiment summary
93%
Positive (4-5★)
1%
Neutral (3★)
6%
Negative (1-2★)