Domain Bid Tracker — auctions in real time
A platform that watches domain auctions across 8 marketplaces in real time — ~35,000 lines of TypeScript, time-series databases and intelligent scoring of which domains are worth it.
What it is
Domain auctions are a small, strange and very fast universe. Good domains expire, drop and sell within minutes — and the marketplaces aren’t in a hurry to help you spot them in time. So I built my own eyes: a platform that watches eight marketplaces simultaneously and tells me what’s worth it before it’s too late.
How it works
Each marketplace gets its own adapter behind a shared interface — one logic for bids, history and schedules regardless of the source. The most interesting part is adaptive polling: an auction ending in 30 seconds gets checked every 15; one ending tomorrow, once an hour. That’s how a single process keeps up with thousands of auctions without tripping a single rate limit.
Every bid is written to TimescaleDB forever with a unique fingerprint — application-level deduplication that makes history immutable. On top of the data, an intelligence layer runs every 5 minutes: bid velocity and acceleration, auction “heat”, last-second sniper risk, and a predicted final price.
Favourite detail
The peak window — when the busiest marketplace closes hundreds of auctions at once — is like a tiny trading day: hours of high-frequency polling, thousands of finished auctions and zero rate-limit errors. Tuning that dance with the rate limiter was more fun than most video games.
What I learned
That time-series databases are wonderful, that every marketplace lies in its own particular way, and that the most valuable asset isn’t the code — it’s the accumulated history nobody can download ready-made.