alt.hn

4/30/2026 at 12:24:53 PM

I aggregated 28 US Government auction sites into one search

 https://bidprowl.com

by scarsam

4/30/2026 at 1:00:28 PM

Clone of "GovAuctions" from 3 weeks ago? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47662945

by xnx

4/30/2026 at 7:49:14 PM

People are realizing lots of government data sources are free and building vibe coding apps around them...

by godzillabrennus

4/30/2026 at 11:59:51 PM

Yea, this one had wrong and broken info all over it.

by millzlane

4/30/2026 at 1:21:02 PM

Thanks for tagging! I got a "traffic spike" notification from Hackernews for my site (https://govauctions.app) and wondered what was going on :-)

by player_piano

4/30/2026 at 4:12:19 PM

Ah thank you for your site! Before your post, I didn't know the government auctioned off homes online and through following the links to the auctions I learned about the FHA $100 down payment program.

by craftkiller

4/30/2026 at 6:30:46 PM

yeah but do you really want to live in an area that has HUD housing? Most of the time they aren't in the best areas and/or in high crime areas. also perhaps the house is gunna take 5-6 figures of work to rehab and become livable. far better ways to burn your $ unless you just really need a house ASAP to live in for a year.

by edm0nd

4/30/2026 at 6:52:33 PM

That may be true in general but I’ve found through years of bargain hunting various items that there are always options that aren’t bad. It takes more work to find them, and you might have to wait a while until the right one comes. It’s worth pursuing.

by cbdevidal

4/30/2026 at 11:46:32 PM

If you look in rural areas they're not too bad in terms of neighbors.

But they'll absolutely have to be gutted and remodeled.

by Loughla

4/30/2026 at 11:23:22 PM

[dead]

by s5300

4/30/2026 at 1:33:09 PM

Your site is awesome. I too am tired of checking five different government auction websites every day, each with a terrible interface from 2005.

by 83

4/30/2026 at 1:36:09 PM

Thank you. I think the highlight so far has been one of my friends buying an industrial lathe that he found on the site!

by player_piano

5/1/2026 at 1:42:15 PM

That is quite the highlight, now you have access to a lathe :) I also bought a large lathe from a government surplus site, it's by far my favorite tool.

by 83

4/30/2026 at 1:23:48 PM

Curious, what are you using for notifications like this?

by rovr138

4/30/2026 at 1:34:29 PM

I am still on Vercel (yes I know, trying to migrate off...) and it gives you automated alerts when there are anomalous traffic spikes. Funnily enough, I have had about 10 scrapers from various places scraping the site in the last week.

by player_piano

4/30/2026 at 1:36:56 PM

> I have had about 10 scrapers from various places scraping the site in the last week.

I hope you're adding some fictitious entries (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fictitious_entry) to track where those scrapes might be going.

by xnx

4/30/2026 at 1:44:32 PM

This sounds like a fun Saturday morning creative writing activity - "lot of 150,000 surplus government Cybertrucks, lightly used"

by player_piano

4/30/2026 at 2:55:56 PM

Oh that would be fantastic.

by sikozu

5/1/2026 at 7:54:24 AM

Where did you hosted those scrapers? where do you store scraped tenders?

by m9a4r3a3n

4/30/2026 at 2:15:44 PM

Sorry to derail...but have we now collectively realized Vercel is kinda crap? I missed the memo.

by kjs3

5/1/2026 at 7:11:59 AM

To be honest, I don't think I've seen anyone mention Vercel here or on Reddit in any way that could be construed as positive in quite awhile.

Most of that is tends to be over pricing or Next.js, when there's probably loads of quietly happy people using it, but... Those people are quiet, so it is hard to tell.

by zdragnar

4/30/2026 at 4:39:17 PM

A lot of your "Madison, WI" listings are actually in Greenbay.

by gavmor

5/3/2026 at 5:16:25 AM

Thanks for flagging. The source's free-text city field gets used directly when I should be deriving from the zip. Adding a zip-to-city normalization step. Will fix.

by scarsam

4/30/2026 at 3:23:54 PM

Cool, I just bought a school bus.

by JumpCrisscross

5/3/2026 at 7:48:25 AM

Hadn't come across govauctions.app before today. Idea came out of a weekly idea bot I run; turns out the same gap was obvious enough that two of us built for it within a few weeks. Well done player_piano!

by scarsam

4/30/2026 at 4:03:35 PM

Looks like that one actually works too!

by beepbooptheory

4/30/2026 at 3:02:01 PM

I'm curious how much of this stuff is actually civil asset forfeiture? (Not to blame the site(s) for such practices, but to think about the whole ecosystem of how a government comes to have a bicycle, switch, truck etc)

https://reason.com/category/criminal-justice/civil-asset-for...

by maerF0x0

4/30/2026 at 6:21:35 PM

I have a friend who handles dispositions of equipment for a very large government contractor. You'd probably be very surprised to see some of what goes through his warehouse. He got rid of two kid's go-karts last year. Government contractors buy some weird stuff for weird reasons.

by graybeardhacker

4/30/2026 at 4:12:34 PM

From what I have seen, not too much, though vehicles might have a higher rate due to impounded cars etc.

by shrubble

5/3/2026 at 5:22:28 AM

[dead]

by scarsam

4/30/2026 at 1:11:45 PM

US Gov auctions are great when you want 400 of something broken or want to travel through 3 states for a $1000 mil-spec kitchen sink.

by 1970-01-01

4/30/2026 at 1:30:48 PM

Or when you've been wanting to one up your neighbor's boat by buying a drug running speedboat with bullet holes.

by 83

4/30/2026 at 4:34:50 PM

One of the top reasons auction hunters hate gun control

The worst ones will try to add a few extra holes the night before the auction

by Barbing

5/1/2026 at 1:48:59 PM

You're probably kidding but I wouldn't put it past someone. Unscrupulous people bring antifreeze in gatorade bottles to the car auction and dump it under cars they want. Be careful out there.

by 83

5/3/2026 at 3:08:31 PM

Oh sheeesh!

By the way I had to spend at least a second trying to figure out whether that antifreeze was somehow going to offgas and damage the vehicle undercarriage :)

But it’s just straightforward dishonest fake leak. Scoundrels!

by Barbing

4/30/2026 at 1:46:27 PM

Or want to get absolutely ripped off by the non-government sellers that are somehow allowed on those platforms. The whole point of Govdeals et al is that the seller is a known-ish quantity. If I wanted to roll the dice on garbage with fresh paint I'd be on Ritchie bros.

Govdeals managed services (or whatever they call it now) is just as questionable as 3rd party sellers on any given big bog store's ecommerce "platform".

by cucumber3732842

4/30/2026 at 2:46:16 PM

> Or want to get absolutely ripped off by the non-government sellers that are somehow allowed on those platforms

I didn't realize the government could become Amazon.

by triceratops

5/1/2026 at 4:21:50 AM

Not government, these are private auction sites that cater to the governments.

by ufocia

5/1/2026 at 12:30:48 AM

If you ever want knives, you can get a fascinating set of them by looking out for the TSA/Airport confiscated items auctions.

Hawaii's one is at https://auctions.ehawaii.gov/dot/welcome.html. I had a boss when I lived in Hawaii that would bid on them, occasionally brought boxes of the random "sharps" (as they were called at the time) that had been confiscated from people by TSA. Some of it is somewhat surprising that people still had on them when they got to TSA, like high quality 18" long machetes.

by Twirrim

5/1/2026 at 12:59:09 AM

My backpack is a bit of a black hole. I used to get pulled up due to carrying my grandfathers pocket knife all the time.

Then as things got worse, these days its screwdrivers, wrenches etc.

Seems like soon even my ethernet cables are going to be taken from me.

by protocolture

5/3/2026 at 7:44:50 AM

[dead]

by scarsam

4/30/2026 at 2:48:26 PM

Is mil spec a good thing or bad thing? It sounds good but I’m guessing you were using it sarcastically?

by SilverElfin

4/30/2026 at 2:54:43 PM

Depends on the item and if you and the military are optimizing for the same thing It's a lowest bidder situation, so keep that in mind.

Mil-spec transport containers? Excellent.

Mil-spec rucksacks? Not so excellent.

by adrianpike

4/30/2026 at 5:35:53 PM

Bid price is kind of irrelevant for milspec. What's actually important is understanding what the spec requires. A crappy rucksack from Amazon doesn't have a milspec, they can say whatever they want as long as it lasts longer than the 30 day warranty and return period. Obviously govsurp rucksacks don't have warranties but there's a legit spec you can look up that says how it was made and tested. Since it wouldn't have been purchased without a certificate of conformity, you can be sure that when the rucksack was new, it should have had a certain level of quality. No milspec manufacturer is designing the product far beyond the milspec because that increases cost and they won't sell. If Ford makes a car that will go for 500k miles without major repairs, it would likely wouldn't sell very well because of how expensive it would be. Meanwhile a car that can go to like 150k miles without major repairs will sell better because it costs less and is still a reasonable lifetime.

The lowest bider thing is such a lame meme. Vendors are going to design a product to cost as little as possible to meet spec. Most consumer products have little to no required specs so they can make it even cheaper. However, since milspec products often just have one spec they are designed to, you have a limited selection of quality. No one is making milspec birkin bags. But in the consumer space, you can buy anything between Temu and high-end designer quality.

by wildzzz

5/1/2026 at 1:29:49 AM

The lowest bidder meme is real, exactly because, for a certain number of contracts, either very junior of very understaffed acquisition professionals will bid out contracts with underspecified requirements. If the contracts have well developed specs, yes, milspec can be great (though it often has an equally great commercial off the shelf comparable).

by derektank

4/30/2026 at 10:27:45 PM

I just stumbled across a Reddit post asking military members what military equipment was actually good and not just the cheapest junk the contractor can deliver. One of the most supported answers was actually the sleeping “system” and wet weather gear. I’m mostly familiar with old surplus stuff. Apparently some of the modern gear is really good.

by tstrimple

4/30/2026 at 12:53:51 PM

Server load issues? Home page loads. Individual states don't seem to.

by yodon

5/3/2026 at 5:19:27 AM

Caught me with the state pages doing live aggregates per request. Spent yesterday pre-rendering them and tuning the ISR caches. Should feel sharper now.

by scarsam

4/30/2026 at 7:10:36 PM

Slow, but working well.

Really needs a way to refine search results to "within X miles of $someGeoPointOrZipCode". I am seeing a lot of neat stuff in California ... but i'm not going to drive 7 hours to go pick it up :)

by baby_souffle

5/3/2026 at 5:22:04 AM

On the list. Blocker is geocoding coverage; not all sources publish lat/long and address quality varies. Backfill in progress.

by scarsam

4/30/2026 at 8:00:51 PM

Agree, or at least a filter by town, which seems to already be included in listings.

by me_online

5/1/2026 at 4:27:11 AM

Not by town, please. There are about 100 in the Bay Area. That's just useless.

Lat long of the town center would work. I don't need precise, but not seeing something 100 meters from me because it's in the next municipal unit is aggravating.

by ____tom____

4/30/2026 at 1:01:00 PM

You need to cache search queries.

by DevX101

5/3/2026 at 5:21:42 AM

Yes, queries are wrapped in unstable_cache (using Next.js) (5min TTL); the box was state landing pages doing aggregates uncached. Pre-rendered those overnight.

by scarsam

4/30/2026 at 3:26:41 PM

I almost bought a lighthouse 25 years ago off of a GSA auction. I'm glad my bid lost because I didn't read the fine print carefully about how much the upkeep would cost.

by bandrami

4/30/2026 at 6:33:55 PM

You just have to fund it by doing a YouTube channel about running it.

by ocdtrekkie

4/30/2026 at 6:24:18 PM

Site doesn't work well. Probably made with AI.

Great idea though

by vatsachak

4/30/2026 at 1:49:29 PM

Looks like you got the Hacker News hug of death. "Oops Something went wrong

The server is under heavy load. Please try again in a moment. "

by graybeardhacker

5/3/2026 at 5:20:48 AM

Should be quicker now!

by scarsam

4/30/2026 at 6:21:56 PM

def some price/updating lags

i saw a listing that ends in 39 minutes and was at $806

i click to be taken to the listing and its $1,270.00

by edm0nd

5/3/2026 at 5:16:56 AM

Fair. The sub-cron only refreshed lots in the next 24h. Tightened it last night: anything ending soon refreshes every 30min, and anything not seen in 48h gets re-checked. Should be much closer to source on endings now.

by scarsam

4/30/2026 at 3:42:01 PM

The site is slow as hell. I've been waiting for 3 minutes and haven't had results.

by samorozco

4/30/2026 at 11:07:43 PM

Vibe coders don't understand concepts such as: indexing, caching, deduping, memoization, profiling, Big O, N+1 queries, lazy loading, connection pooling, pagination, re-render management, layout thrashing, virtualization, debouncing, code splitting, memory leaks, garbage collection, streaming vs. buffering, async parallelism, main thread blocking, race conditions, backpressure, request waterfalls, payload optimization, batching, round-trip costs, cache invalidation, hot path analysis, data structure selection, and countless other concepts related to performance."

by Unbeliever69

5/3/2026 at 5:19:53 AM

Caught me with the state pages doing live aggregates per request. Spent yesterday pre-rendering them and tuning the ISR caches. Should feel sharper now.

by scarsam

4/30/2026 at 4:49:56 PM

Browsing is just one part, each jurisdiction and agency within each jurisdiction has its own process to even be able to join the auction

Sometimes requiring months in advance

So I want an agent that does that automatically and I don’t want to do it on my computer

by yieldcrv

5/3/2026 at 7:46:05 AM

[dead]

by scarsam

4/30/2026 at 2:53:45 PM

I'm loving how the deal of the day is a golf cart. https://bidprowl.com/deal-of-the-day/2026-04-30

by sikozu

5/3/2026 at 5:24:58 AM

Deal of the Day is whatever scored highest yesterday. Sometimes glamorous, often a golf cart.

by scarsam

5/1/2026 at 10:11:33 AM

This looks to be a vacant residential lot for under $3k: https://bidprowl.com/listing/vacant-lot-in-santa-clarita-los...

What am I missing?

by markdown

5/3/2026 at 5:23:23 AM

Some are real bargains, some are landlocked or carry HOA back-fees not in the listing. The good ones tend to disappear in the first hour.

by scarsam

4/30/2026 at 2:28:40 PM

Great idea. Seems to be experiencing the hug of death at the moment, though.

by perdomon

5/3/2026 at 5:20:31 AM

Tuned the ISR cache, should be quicker now!

by scarsam

4/30/2026 at 1:16:13 PM

Cool idea, I tapped the vehicles / heavy equipment tabs expecting to be taken to listings. Nothing happened. Maybe these should all take you to a page that lets you sign up to see listings?

by sjducb

5/3/2026 at 5:18:26 AM

Fixing today. Categories should render an empty state with a signup prompt rather than a blank page.

by scarsam

4/30/2026 at 11:11:47 PM

Weird, the first two auction items I checked on for Oregon (sorted by highest) were already bid for and won. Is this not clearing out finished auctions?

by kraptv

5/3/2026 at 5:17:48 AM

Real bug. Adapter wasn't reading "lot closed" pages and was relying on a 7-day stale window. Tightened to 5 days plus a 30-min priority refresh on anything stale > 48h. Each adapter now flips status on the source's signal directly.

by scarsam

4/30/2026 at 12:50:19 PM

First thing I searched was Pokemon cards and found items with bids at 50% higher than market value...either shill bidding or folks who are bidding blindly.

by bbstats

4/30/2026 at 12:52:49 PM

Surprised you even got it to load.

by reactordev

4/30/2026 at 6:39:21 PM

I know they aren't states but is there a way to add Puerto Rico and the Virgin islands? I know some auction sites include them.

by minorj47

5/3/2026 at 5:26:25 AM

On the list, in next week's batch with Guam. Feel free to drop some of the ones you would like to get included!

by scarsam

4/30/2026 at 4:32:31 PM

Any plans for RSS feed(s)? Would love to passively track the auctions in this manner. Per state, ending soon etc. would be fantastic.

by jjordan

5/3/2026 at 5:26:43 AM

Easy ship. Will get state, category, and ending-soon feeds out this week.

by scarsam

4/30/2026 at 3:07:19 PM

Didn’t a site like this just show up a few weeks back on here? What is the interest in government auction sites?

by infecto

4/30/2026 at 3:44:53 PM

Prices are going up. People are looking for bargains.

by pimlottc

4/30/2026 at 3:19:43 PM

I chose 'Colorado' from the state dropdown and got a blank page. Does the site work at all?

by sparrish

5/3/2026 at 12:09:58 PM

Sorry about that. State pages were doing live aggregates per request and the HN spike killed them. Pre-rendered overnight; Colorado loads instantly now.

by scarsam

4/30/2026 at 2:06:53 PM

Nice execution. How are you handling deduplication when the same asset shows up on multiple sites?

by pwr1

4/30/2026 at 3:26:22 PM

I work in the HR space and though about something similar with jobs. A bunch of recuiters will publish the same job. What I figured would be best is have one job entry and show all the recruiters who published and let you go to one of them.

by postalrat

5/3/2026 at 5:23:07 AM

[dead]

by scarsam

4/30/2026 at 5:17:26 PM

might just be on my end, but I cant seem to access the state filtered page? i.e. https://bidprowl.com/auctions/california

by AnishLaddha

5/3/2026 at 7:43:43 AM

[dead]

by scarsam

4/30/2026 at 11:35:19 PM

Very cool, is there something similar for other countries, like the UK?

by dom96

5/3/2026 at 5:28:04 AM

Not that I've built. The UK has GovBuying but that's procurement, not surplus. If you know of an aggregator I'd be curious.

by scarsam

4/30/2026 at 3:01:31 PM

Search just seems broken for me. I get

> Error: Invalid frameId for foreground frameId: 0

on Chrome 147.0.7727.102

by ambicapter

5/3/2026 at 5:30:41 AM

Maybe some chrome extension causing this on your end?

by scarsam

4/30/2026 at 7:32:48 PM

Oh sure, bring their attention to more people and make the prices go up.

by mmmlinux

5/1/2026 at 7:19:57 PM

does anyone know if there are us gov auction sites for places overseas like military bases embassies etc ?

by guest__user

4/30/2026 at 10:44:09 PM

Doesn't support negative query modifiers?

by qingcharles

5/3/2026 at 5:27:11 AM

Not yet. Plain Postgres FTS today. Will add -term exclusion.

by scarsam

4/30/2026 at 10:23:32 PM

Really needs sort by distance.

by tectonic

5/3/2026 at 7:44:08 AM

[dead]

by scarsam

4/30/2026 at 2:10:23 PM

Missed the District of Columbia

by kdot

5/3/2026 at 5:28:25 AM

Just shipped DC.

by scarsam

4/30/2026 at 1:44:05 PM

Not responding on states links. Maybe increase the cache and add another compute to server scaling

by spate141

5/3/2026 at 5:21:15 AM

Should be working better now.

by scarsam

4/30/2026 at 3:20:59 PM

Commerce is so back!

by hchak

5/3/2026 at 5:28:40 AM

You bet!

by scarsam

4/30/2026 at 12:24:53 PM

US government auctions are scattered across at least 28 platforms. GSA sells decommissioned federal fleet. DLA Disposition moves military gear. The US Marshals front seized property through bid4assets. PublicSurplus runs school district and state-agency lots. GovDeals fronts thousands of county and municipal agencies. Fannie Mae and HUD auction foreclosed homes. None of these sites index together, and most have search UX that lost a fight with 2008.

So I scraped them all and put one search box in front. 180,276 active listings as of today, normalized into a shared schema in Postgres with full-text search. About 53,000 new listings come in every week.

A few real things you can buy this week, all live in the data:

- A 2000 Bell 430 helicopter (executive model), $250k starting, 0 bids: https://www.govdeals.com/asset/8103/23762

- A 1985 Cessna 182R aircraft in Missouri, $33k starting, 0 bids: https://www.govdeals.com/asset/36476/430

- An M75 APC armored personnel carrier on Ritchie Bros, no bids yet: https://www.rbauction.com/pdp/armored-tank-m75-apc-personnel...

- A Rolls-Royce ship thruster, never used, $500k starting: https://www.govdeals.com/asset/247/16144

- A 2.3 kg iridium-platinum ingot (police seizure on PropertyRoom), 52 bids, currently $175k: https://www.propertyroom.com/l/iridium-platinum-ingot-ir90-p...

- A 1927 Seagrave fire truck, "runs, drives, and titled," $24k, 0 bids: https://www.govdeals.com/asset/285/16223

- A truck-mounted forklift from a manufacturer literally named "Donkey & Burro": https://www.govplanet.com/for-sale/Forklifts/14842632

The work that took longest wasn't the scraping (each source has its own quirky JSON or HTML), it was the dedup. The same Fannie Mae foreclosure shows up under three different addresses across three platforms. A "2008 Ford F-150" from GSA Fleet looks structurally identical to one from PublicSurplus, but they're different vehicles with different VINs, and the only way to know is to fingerprint enough metadata to make a confident match.

There's a deal score per listing (price vs category median, bid velocity, time remaining, starting-bid ratio) and SEO landing pages per state-by-category combo, mostly because long-tail government-auction queries on Google are nearly all unanswered.

Stack: Next.js, Postgres, TypeScript scrapers per source, daily refresh.

Happy to answer questions about scraping the federal sites (some of them really do not want to be scraped) or how the deal scoring works.

by scarsam

4/30/2026 at 7:35:09 PM

Don't forget the Aircraft Jet Blast Deflector you've always dreamed of!

https://www.govdeals.com/en/asset/2402/13188

by djmips

4/30/2026 at 8:06:52 PM

That's the kind of listing that earns its CDN cache.

by scarsam

5/3/2026 at 10:32:40 PM

[flagged]

by scarsam

4/30/2026 at 1:23:47 PM

[flagged]

by Xiaoher-C

4/30/2026 at 2:25:16 PM

[dead]

by mintarex

4/30/2026 at 1:19:38 PM

Can I finally find a cosmoline packed Jeep in the original crate for $50? /s

I wish I had jumped on those offers back when they were in the back of Boys Life, Popular Mechanics, and SOF magazines back in the day.

by zikduruqe

4/30/2026 at 9:27:18 PM

[dead]

by ConanRus

4/30/2026 at 2:25:03 PM

[dead]

by wotsdat