Bid at the last second, without showing your hand.
Tell BidBuddy the most you'll pay. It waits, and places that bid a few seconds before the auction closes — so nobody has time to walk their own maximum up against yours.
The hard part isn't deciding when to bid. It's getting there.
Sniping doesn't raise your maximum — it hides it until it's too late for anyone to respond. Which only works if the bid actually lands when you meant it to. Four things stand between an intention and a bid on the wire.
It syncs
The auction ends when eBay says it does. BidBuddy measures the offset between its clock and eBay's the way NTP does, keeping the sample with the shortest round trip.
It waits
Not one long timer — long timers drift and don't survive a suspended machine. The wait is stepped in one-second chunks that re-read the deadline every time they wake.
It warms up
Twenty-five seconds out it re-syncs the clock, re-reads the listing and opens the connection — so the bid isn't paying for a TLS handshake out of a six-second budget.
It fires
Sent one measured round trip before it should land, then retried if it has to be — stopping well before the hammer, because a bid that arrives late is just a line in a log.
Rehearse it before you spend a penny.
Everything goes through eBay's official Trading API — nothing here logs into the website, drives a browser or scrapes a page. And nothing bids real money until you say so.
- Dry runs do everything a real snipe does — the sync, the wait, the round trip to eBay — and stop short of sending the bid
- Bid groups: "I want one of these five lenses" — the rest stand down once the group has a win
- Survives restarts: a snipe interrupted mid-flight is re-bid, or reconciled against eBay's own record
- Every snipe records what actually happened — "landed 6.04s" — so you can see whether your lead time is being honoured
What it won't do.
The same rule as everything else we build: say the awkward part out loud, before it costs someone something.
It won't beat someone who wants it more
Sniping doesn't raise your maximum. If another bidder's hidden maximum is above yours, you lose — earlier, later, or at the last second. What it avoids is revealing yours in time for them to reconsider theirs.
It won't bid on Buy It Now
There's nothing to snipe on a fixed-price listing — it's bought, not bid on. BidBuddy checks the listing before scheduling and tells you straight away.
It won't run while your laptop sleeps
It needs a machine that's awake and online at the moment the auction closes. A small always-on box — a VPS, a Pi, a home server — is the honest requirement.
Careful with the clock. Careful with your money.
BidBuddy is the same belief as the rest of Humanish, pointed at auctions: do the exacting, repetitive work quietly in the background, and never let the person on the other side of the screen be surprised by what it did.
It shows its working
Every snipe keeps a history: what was scheduled, what the clock said, how early the bid landed, what eBay answered. Nothing happens that you can't read back.
It errs towards missing
A bid group would rather skip an auction than win two — missing one costs you the auction; winning twice costs money you didn't mean to spend and can't undo.
No sitting up for the close
Set your maximum in the afternoon and go to bed. The whole point is not having to be at the keyboard when the hammer falls.
Stop losing auctions in the last ten seconds.
BidBuddy runs on your own machine, with your own eBay developer keys — so it's a setup conversation, not a sign-up. Tell us what you're bidding on and we'll help you get it running.