OSRS Flip Finder
A flip finder is a tool that scans every tradeable item on the Old School RuneScape Grand Exchange, computes the difference between what people are paying and what people are selling for, subtracts the 2% GE tax, and sorts the results so a merchant can pick their next buy slot in seconds instead of scrolling the Wiki by hand.
What a flip finder actually does
The Grand Exchange has thousands of tradeable items. Only a fraction have a healthy spread between their insta-buy and insta-sell prices at any moment. A flip finder does three things at once:
- Pulls live buy and sell prices from a public price source (in GE IQ's case, the official OSRS Wiki real-time pricing API).
- Applies the correct 2% Grand Exchange tax (capped at 5,000,000 GP per item) so the margin you see is what actually lands in your bank.
- Ranks items by a score that combines margin size, trade volume, and price stability so a strong flip does not get buried under a volatile spike.
What a flip finder is not
It is not a signal of future profit. It is a snapshot. The margin you see can widen, narrow, or flip negative in minutes. Buy limits, weekend supply shifts, and Wednesday updates all move prices faster than any refresh cycle. A good flip finder tells you what the market looks like right now; the decision to commit a GE slot is yours.
What to look for in a flip finder
- Tax-aware margin. The GE tax is 2% of the sell price, capped at 5M per item. Anything showing gross margin without subtracting tax will overstate profit on high-value flips.
- Volume, not just spread. A 30% margin on an item that trades ten times a day is worse than a 3% margin on an item that trades ten thousand times a day.
- Buy-limit context. Every item has a per-4-hour buy cap. Margin × limit is the real ceiling for one cycle.
- Stability score. A margin that has held for 24 hours is not the same as a margin that appeared five minutes ago.
- Bankroll filtering. A margin you cannot afford to buy the full limit of is not useful data.
How GE IQ ranks flips
GE IQ refreshes every two minutes from the OSRS Wiki API and assigns each item a grade from A to F based on tax-aware margin, five-minute and hourly volume, and price stability. It filters by your bankroll and by whether an item is F2P or members. It shows the profit ceiling for one buy-limit cycle so you can compare a 4M-margin play to a 500k-margin play on equal footing. Read the methodology for the scoring formula.