ABOUT BID TAPE

Bid Tape is a read-only observer of the August 2026 "pay-to-claim" leaderboard wave — sites where you pay to sit at the top of a public leaderboard until someone pays more. It crawls public pages on a schedule, records the top-slot price as a timeseries, and tracks which boards are still alive. It never takes payments, never places bids, and never lists anything for a fee.

What we take no money for

There is no paid tier, no sponsored placement, no affiliate link, and no ad on this site. That is a deliberate, structural choice, not a placeholder — see the project brief if you're curious why.

How the crawler works

• Public, unauthenticated pages only. We never log in or bypass a paywall.
• We check robots.txt before the first crawl of any host and skip disallowed paths entirely.
• At most one request per board per 10 minutes. Live boards are checked roughly every 15 minutes, quiet boards hourly, dead boards every 6 hours.
• Global concurrency is capped at 3 requests in flight, with a randomized 1–3s delay before every request.
• Two consecutive 429 responses from a host pause that host for 60 minutes.
• We identify ourselves honestly: User-Agent: BidTapeBot/1.0, with a contact address.
• Some boards (like outbid.lol) rate-limit hard enough that a direct crawl fails repeatedly. For those, and only while our own crawler is stuck, we fall back to a recent public reading from afford.bid — labeled "via afford.bid", never presented as our own observation.

How the numbers work

REVENUE is only what a board states about itself, on its front page or its about page. Nothing here sums a board's bids and calls the result revenue. Most boards say nothing, which is why most of that column is a dash.

TOP BID is the figure in the first row of the board's own list, not the largest number on its page — that one is usually a price cap or a featured tier. BIDS counts the rows on the front page, so paginated boards read low.

Boards priced in another currency are never silently converted — we show their own currency, labeled, rather than guess an exchange rate.

Boards that draw their leaderboard in the browser are read with headless Chrome instead of a plain fetch. A read that fails keeps the last figure rather than blanking the row — we never write a zero or a null over a real prior value just because one check failed.

What the source labels mean

• observed — a number our own crawler measured directly from the board's public page (plain fetch, or headless Chrome for boards that render client-side).
• via afford.bid — for a board our crawler is currently stuck on (repeated failures), we fall back to afford.bid's own public reading, only if it's less than 24h old, and we say so explicitly on that board's page. This is never mixed into our own "observed" numbers.
• reported by operator — a figure the board's own operator published, not independently verified by us.
• manual — entered by a human, used for boards we haven't built an automated parser for yet.
• estimated — derived by arithmetic from other numbers; the formula is always disclosed at the point of use.
• — — genuinely unknown. We never fill a gap with a guess or a zero.

Status definitions

• live — an observed change within the last 6 hours.
• quiet — no change for 6–48 hours.
• dead — no change for more than 48 hours.
• unknown — our parser has failed 3 times in a row on this board; excluded from aggregate stats so a broken parser can't distort them.

Removal requests

If you run one of the tracked boards and want it removed, email ratwani.rohan@gmail.com — we honor removal requests within 24 hours, no argument. We store board-level numbers only; we don't store or display bidder names, emails, or profile links beyond what the leaderboard already shows publicly, and we'll drop even that on request.

Known limitations

• Boards without an automated parser show "—" until hand-inspected.
• Non-USD boards are labeled with their own currency and never silently converted.
• Bid counts undercount any board that paginates its leaderboard — we only read the front page.
• Directory/tracker sites of this same wave (afford.bid, outbid.fyi, and similar) are excluded from the tape entirely — they aren't pay-to-claim boards themselves.
• History only starts from when we first crawled a board — it cannot be backfilled.