RapidFTA

RapidFTA is an advanced searching tool for BidFTA auctions. It aggregates auctions across multiple locations and provides powerful filtering to help users quickly find what they’re looking for. It started as a one-off to avoid scrolling through hundreds of pages for a few good items and has grown into a tool a lot of people rely on every week.

It’s an independent project, not affiliated with any auction company; all data comes from publicly available sources. The latest changes are always listed at rapidfta.com/changelog.

Searching

• Simple Search for quick lookups, with an Advanced Filters mode when you need more control
• Infinite scrolling to quickly browse hundreds of auctions, with quick-view photos, expandable images and an info popover for full item descriptions
• Filters saved in the URL, so a bookmark is a saved search, plus a share button for any item
• Filter by location, condition and product category
• Multi-tag text search across name and description, with matching keywords highlighted and pushed to the top, and text exclusion to hide uninteresting results
• MSRP price range, maximum current bid and minimum percent-off filters, plus toggles for lots without an MSRP and lots with pictures
• Time-remaining filter for auctions ending soon
• Past sale price tracking: every item’s average sale price across previous auctions, with a price history chart on the item page, so you can tell whether a deal is really a deal
• Item detail pages with bid history and rich link previews when shared
• Dark mode

Watching and notifications

• Sign up for a free account to save named filters and watch items
• “Notify Me” on any item sends an email before that auction ends, and a Watched Auctions page keeps them all in one place
• A daily morning digest email of new items that match your saved filters

Under the hood

An Angular frontend on a Go backend with PostgreSQL, run as a set of services: a collector that ingests the auction data feed through pluggable providers, a notifier that sends the digest and auction-ending emails, the API itself, and an uptime monitor that serves an outage page if anything is down. There is also a small MCP server that exposes read-only metrics and guarded SQL queries so I can ask an assistant how the site is doing.

Everything deploys as a Docker Swarm stack behind a single Cloudflare connector, with a preview environment per pull request, scheduled database backups and a periodic security review. Feature requests and bug reports come in through anonymous forms on the site.