GovAuctions lets you browse government auctions at once
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I've long been into finding deals on government auction sites (seizures, surplus sales etc.) - right now for example San Diego DHS is selling 26 tons of lead shot, with bidding starting at $1,000 ¯\_(ツ)_/¯It has historically been extremely tedious though: scanning dozens of janky sites which have interminable page loading times; back buttons take you all the way back to the homepage etc.The site I built - GovAuctions - lets you search every government surplus auction at once. You can filter by location, category, and price, save items to a watchlist, and get alerts when new auctions match what you're looking for.Let me know what you think, if you have any suggestions, and if you find any deals in your area!
HN · launched Apr 6, 2026 · 319 upvotes (top 2%) · 0 views
Niche: vertical search engines and directories · 98 launches, 7 in the last 7 days ▼ -46% · Explore this niche →
Category and tags
- Government
- Marketplace
- B2C
- Not AI
- Commercial product
Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗
More like this: all 98 launches in vertical search engines and directories →
Could you build this?
Partial The search and aggregation frontend is straightforward, but scraping, parsing, and normalizing dozens of fragmented, heterogeneous government auction sites with varying anti-scraping and outdated formats is inherently tedious and maintenance-heavy.
What it would actually take: The system relies on a crawler fleet (Playwright/Scrapy), automated extraction pipelines (LLM-based parsing and schema normalization), and a search backend like Meilisearch or Elasticsearch. The primary challenge is building and maintaining robust extractors across dozens of fragmented, unstable state and federal auction platforms that lack unified APIs and frequently employ anti-bot measures. Maintaining reliable data pipelines requires specialized data engineering and crawler operations.
Discussion
20 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: GovDeals, wisconsinsurplus.com
Concerns raised: Missing GovDeals data makes it incomplete, State selection bug showing only Wisconsin, Pickup-only logistics vary by agency, Unclear which government/country auctions are included
Feature requests: Specify country and government jurisdiction in title/listings, Include GovDeals auction data
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one : 161 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #5 of 162 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 146 days after the earliest competitor.
- GovBidFit · ph · 2026-10-15 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.56
- Sell to State · ph · 2026-09-21 · 105 upvotes · similarity 0.52
- PublicBidSearch · ph · 2026-10-27 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.51
- MCP Bids · ph · 2026-11-02 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.48
- BidRep · ph · 2026-11-03 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.47
- Solicitation Daily · ph · 2026-11-09 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.46
- GhostNode · ph · 2026-10-17 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.46
- BidEasy · ph · 2026-11-02 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.46
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