- Clone of "GovAuctions" from 3 weeks ago? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47662945
- People are realizing lots of government data sources are free and building vibe coding apps around them...
- Yea, this one had wrong and broken info all over it.
- Thanks for tagging! I got a "traffic spike" notification from Hackernews for my site (https://govauctions.app) and wondered what was going on :-)
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
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- Your site is awesome. I too am tired of checking five different government auction websites every day, each with a terrible interface from 2005.
- Thank you. I think the highlight so far has been one of my friends buying an industrial lathe that he found on the site!
- Curious, what are you using for notifications like this?
- 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.
- > 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.
- This sounds like a fun Saturday morning creative writing activity - "lot of 150,000 surplus government Cybertrucks, lightly used"
- Oh that would be fantastic.
- Where did you hosted those scrapers? where do you store scraped tenders?
- Sorry to derail...but have we now collectively realized Vercel is kinda crap? I missed the memo.
- 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.
- A lot of your "Madison, WI" listings are actually in Greenbay.
- Cool, I just bought a school bus.
- Looks like that one actually works too!
- 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...
- 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.
- From what I have seen, not too much, though vehicles might have a higher rate due to impounded cars etc.
- 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.
- Or when you've been wanting to one up your neighbor's boat by buying a drug running speedboat with bullet holes.
- 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
- 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".
- > 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.
- Not government, these are private auction sites that cater to the governments.
- 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.
- 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.
- Is mil spec a good thing or bad thing? It sounds good but I’m guessing you were using it sarcastically?
- 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.
- 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.
- 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).
- 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.
- 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 :)
- Agree, or at least a filter by town, which seems to already be included in listings.
- 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.
- https://bidprowl.com/listing/lot-of-355-alcatel-kyocera-soni...
This is GOLD, Jerry, GOLD!
- Server load issues? Home page loads. Individual states don't seem to.
- You need to cache search queries.
- 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.
- You just have to fund it by doing a YouTube channel about running it.
- That’s exactly what the project lighthouse guys did.
- Site doesn't work well. Probably made with AI.
Great idea though
- 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
- 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. "
- 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?
- The site is slow as hell. I've been waiting for 3 minutes and haven't had results.
- 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."
- I'm loving how the deal of the day is a golf cart. https://bidprowl.com/deal-of-the-day/2026-04-30
- 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?
- Great idea. Seems to be experiencing the hug of death at the moment, though.
- 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?
- 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.
- Very cool, is there something similar for other countries, like the UK?
- Any plans for RSS feed(s)? Would love to passively track the auctions in this manner. Per state, ending soon etc. would be fantastic.
- 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.
- Surprised you even got it to load.
- I chose 'Colorado' from the state dropdown and got a blank page. Does the site work at all?
- Oh sure, bring their attention to more people and make the prices go up.
- might just be on my end, but I cant seem to access the state filtered page? i.e. https://bidprowl.com/auctions/california
- Nice execution. How are you handling deduplication when the same asset shows up on multiple sites?
- 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.
- Doesn't support negative query modifiers?
- Search just seems broken for me. I get
> Error: Invalid frameId for foreground frameId: 0
on Chrome 147.0.7727.102
- Really needs sort by distance.
- Missed the District of Columbia
- Not responding on states links. Maybe increase the cache and add another compute to server scaling
- 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
- Commerce is so back!
- 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.
- Don't forget the Aircraft Jet Blast Deflector you've always dreamed of!
- That's the kind of listing that earns its CDN cache.
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- 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.
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285 points by scarsam 23 hours ago | 79 comments