I aggregated 28 US Government auction sites into one search (bidprowl.com)
284 points by scarsam a day ago
xnx a day ago
Clone of "GovAuctions" from 3 weeks ago? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47662945
godzillabrennus 15 hours ago
People are realizing lots of government data sources are free and building vibe coding apps around them...
millzlane 11 hours ago
Yea, this one had wrong and broken info all over it.
player_piano 21 hours ago
Thanks for tagging! I got a "traffic spike" notification from Hackernews for my site (https://govauctions.app) and wondered what was going on :-)
craftkiller 19 hours ago
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.
edm0nd 16 hours ago
83 21 hours ago
Your site is awesome. I too am tired of checking five different government auction websites every day, each with a terrible interface from 2005.
player_piano 21 hours ago
rovr138 21 hours ago
Curious, what are you using for notifications like this?
player_piano 21 hours ago
gavmor 18 hours ago
A lot of your "Madison, WI" listings are actually in Greenbay.
JumpCrisscross 19 hours ago
Cool, I just bought a school bus.
beepbooptheory 19 hours ago
Looks like that one actually works too!
maerF0x0 20 hours ago
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...
graybeardhacker 16 hours ago
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.
shrubble 19 hours ago
From what I have seen, not too much, though vehicles might have a higher rate due to impounded cars etc.
1970-01-01 a day ago
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.
83 21 hours ago
Or when you've been wanting to one up your neighbor's boat by buying a drug running speedboat with bullet holes.
Barbing 18 hours ago
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
cucumber3732842 21 hours ago
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".
triceratops 20 hours ago
Twirrim 10 hours ago
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.
protocolture 10 hours ago
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.
SilverElfin 20 hours ago
Is mil spec a good thing or bad thing? It sounds good but I’m guessing you were using it sarcastically?
adrianpike 20 hours ago
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.
wildzzz 17 hours ago
tstrimple 12 hours ago
baby_souffle 16 hours ago
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 :)
markdown 41 minutes ago
https://bidprowl.com/listing/lot-of-355-alcatel-kyocera-soni...
This is GOLD, Jerry, GOLD!
me_online 15 hours ago
Agree, or at least a filter by town, which seems to already be included in listings.
____tom____ 6 hours ago
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.
yodon a day ago
Server load issues? Home page loads. Individual states don't seem to.
DevX101 a day ago
You need to cache search queries.
bandrami 19 hours ago
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.
ocdtrekkie 16 hours ago
You just have to fund it by doing a YouTube channel about running it.
jcoby 14 hours ago
That’s exactly what the project lighthouse guys did.
vatsachak 16 hours ago
Site doesn't work well. Probably made with AI.
Great idea though
edm0nd 16 hours ago
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
graybeardhacker 21 hours ago
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. "
kraptv 12 hours ago
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?
samorozco 19 hours ago
The site is slow as hell. I've been waiting for 3 minutes and haven't had results.
Unbeliever69 12 hours ago
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."
sikozu 20 hours ago
I'm loving how the deal of the day is a golf cart. https://bidprowl.com/deal-of-the-day/2026-04-30
markdown 37 minutes ago
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?
perdomon 20 hours ago
Great idea. Seems to be experiencing the hug of death at the moment, though.
minorj47 16 hours ago
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.
sjducb a day ago
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?
dom96 11 hours ago
Very cool, is there something similar for other countries, like the UK?
jjordan 18 hours ago
Any plans for RSS feed(s)? Would love to passively track the auctions in this manner. Per state, ending soon etc. would be fantastic.
bbstats a day ago
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.
reactordev a day ago
Surprised you even got it to load.
infecto 20 hours ago
Didn’t a site like this just show up a few weeks back on here? What is the interest in government auction sites?
pimlottc 19 hours ago
Prices are going up. People are looking for bargains.
mmmlinux 15 hours ago
Oh sure, bring their attention to more people and make the prices go up.
sparrish 19 hours ago
I chose 'Colorado' from the state dropdown and got a blank page. Does the site work at all?
AnishLaddha 18 hours ago
might just be on my end, but I cant seem to access the state filtered page? i.e. https://bidprowl.com/auctions/california
qingcharles 12 hours ago
Doesn't support negative query modifiers?
pwr1 21 hours ago
Nice execution. How are you handling deduplication when the same asset shows up on multiple sites?
postalrat 19 hours ago
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.
ambicapter 20 hours ago
Search just seems broken for me. I get
> Error: Invalid frameId for foreground frameId: 0
on Chrome 147.0.7727.102
tectonic 12 hours ago
Really needs sort by distance.
kdot 21 hours ago
Missed the District of Columbia
spate141 21 hours ago
Not responding on states links. Maybe increase the cache and add another compute to server scaling
yieldcrv 18 hours ago
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
hchak 19 hours ago
Commerce is so back!
scarsam a day ago
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.
djmips 15 hours ago
Don't forget the Aircraft Jet Blast Deflector you've always dreamed of!
scarsam 15 hours ago
That's the kind of listing that earns its CDN cache.
zikduruqe 21 hours ago
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.