Automated Gold Price Tracking System
Real-time gold price monitoring with automated scraping, API integration, data storage in Google Sheets, Looker Studio visualization, and Telegram bot alerts.
- Role
- Data Engineer (Personal Project)
- Timeline
- 2026 – Ongoing
- Team
- Solo
- Status
- In Progress
The problem
Checking gold prices by hand across several sources is tedious and easy to forget. I wanted prices captured on a schedule, stored, charted, and flagged only when something meaningful happens.
Constraints
- Zero infrastructure to run or pay for
- Alerts must stay signal, not noise
- Almost no maintenance once it is running
Architecture
Step 1, Ingest
Apps Script triggers
Scheduled and serverless
Step 2, External
Price APIs
Gold price sources
Step 3, Data
Google Sheets
Normalised, de-duplicated store
Step 4, Interface
Looker Studio
Always-fresh trend dashboard
Step 5, Interface
Telegram bot
Threshold alerts
Engineering decisions
Serverless triggers instead of a server
- Context
- A personal data project dies the moment it needs babysitting.
- Decision
- Ran the entire pipeline on Google Apps Script time-driven triggers.
- Trade-off
- Tied to the Apps Script runtime and its quotas.
A spreadsheet as the database
- Context
- The data had to be easy to inspect and chart without extra services.
- Decision
- Stored normalised, de-duplicated rows in Google Sheets, which Looker Studio reads directly.
- Trade-off
- Not a data warehouse — but for one time series it keeps everything visible and free.
Threshold-based alerts
- Context
- Alerts on every price change would quickly be ignored.
- Decision
- The Telegram bot fires only when prices cross configurable thresholds.
Outcomes
Automation
Alert System
Visualization
- Runs fully automated on a schedule
- Always-fresh dashboards straight from the data store
- Costs nothing to run and needs almost no maintenance
Reflections
Lessons learned
More than anything, it proved how much of a superpower serverless, schedule-driven automation is for personal data projects — the entire system costs nothing to run and needs almost no maintenance once the triggers are set, which is exactly what keeps it alive long after the initial build.
What's next
It runs fully automated today and remains an ongoing personal project I extend whenever a new data source becomes useful.
Proof — verify it yourself
The source and demo for this project aren’t public. Get in touch for a walkthrough.
Tech stack
- Google Apps Script
- JavaScript
- APIs
- Looker Studio
- Telegram Bot
Work with me
Facing a similar challenge?
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