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.

What the labels mean

• observed — a number our crawler measured directly from the board's public page.
• 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.
• History only starts from when we first crawled a board — it cannot be backfilled.