Running on live CTBids estate sales · Built on Claude

Find the sleeper in the box lot.

Picker's Eye goes through every lot in an online estate-sale auction, reads the hallmarks, signatures and maker's marks in the photos, and hands you a ranked list: what to bid on, and the most to pay.

Get early access How it works
Illustration. Move your cursor over the table, or tap an item. Lots, marks and values are examples.
How it works

From a sale link to a shopping list.

An estate sale can run to hundreds of lots, each a jumble of photos. Picker's Eye looks at all of them, so you only look at the ones worth your money.

01 · PULL

Paste a sale link

It pulls every lot: the photos, the title, the seller's description and the current bid.

02 · LOOK

Read every piece

Claude lists the notable pieces in each lot one by one, so a sterling spoon in a box of kitchen junk isn't averaged away. It reads marks and signatures, and flags unsure finds for research instead of guessing.

03 · PRICE

Do the math

Each piece gets a resale range. The max bid uses the low end, after fees, shipping, your profit and the buyer's premium.

04 · RANK

Watch the close

One ranked page with a countdown on every lot. Prices refresh themselves, faster as a close gets near.

05 · LEARN

Keep score

After the sale closes, it lines its estimates up against the final prices, and you mark its calls right or wrong.

The math

No black box. Here's the formula.

Every max bid on the report comes from one line of arithmetic you can check. Move the sliders.

The sliders start at Picker's Eye's real defaults. The premium and tax are added on top of your winning bid, so the bid is divided by 1 + premium + tax. The result is rounded down to the auction's bid step.
$0most you should bid
The report

One page. Every lot that matters.

Ranked by opportunity, with what Claude saw, the estimate, your max bid, the live bid and a countdown on each lot. Mark lots as you go.

Example estate sale · 190 lots · closes one lot at a timeprices refresh on their own
Lot · what Claude sawResale est.Max bidCurrentCloses inVerdictYour mark
Example report: lots are the illustration above, and bids and countdowns are simulated.Your marks stay in your browser.
Countdown on every lotEstate sales close one lot at a time, so each lot has its own clock.
Prices that refreshEvery 60 seconds while lots are open; every 15 once a close is under 15 minutes away.
Upside, kept honestWhen a find depends on authentication, the high end shows as "up to $X if it checks out", but the bid stays on the safe low end.
Built for big salesThe report draws lots in slices of 150: a 1,580-lot report renders in 0.2 seconds.
Built on Claude

An expert eye, lot by lot.

The careful read of each lot runs on Claude Opus 5 by default, through Anthropic's Batches API. Claude names the pieces, reads the marks, gives a resale range and says how sure it is. A cheaper model does a quick nightly first pass on the big thrift sites; Claude does the close reading. Every valuation is saved, so a re-run costs nothing.

CTBidsOnline estate sales: analysis, live report and after-sale scoringFull loop
LiveAuctioneersAuction catalogs, with each catalog's own premium and bid stepsSupported
HiBidCatalogs and hand-picked lot sets, plus a nightly scanSupported
ShopGoodwillHand-picked lot sets, plus a nightly scan for sleepersSupported
~4¢
per lot for Claude Opus 5 to read it ($9.69 for a 224-lot sale)
56,000+
sold estate-sale lots in its price database
1,100+
automated tests behind the bid math, sources and report
0
automatic bids. You place every bid yourself.
Early access

Buy at online estate sales? Let's talk.

Picker's Eye is a working tool, used on live sales by the person who built it. I'm opening it to a small group of resellers. Email me with the sites you buy on and what you resell.

jason@pickerseye.com Jason, founder