Priceonomics (YC W12) Tells You What Everything is Worth

How do startups get around the Craigslist TOU against using "automated means, including spiders, robots, crawlers, data mining tools, or the like to download data from the Service" (<a href="http://www.craigslist.org/about/terms.of.use" rel="nofollow">http://www.craigslist.org/about/terms.of.use</a>)?

Seems like premature publicity. Great idea that is far from being useful right now. If you actually want customers you need to prove you can provide value.<p>My first try was "iPhone 4" and it showed me the average price for all iPhones, from iPhone originals to broken iPhones to locked iPhones etc. That's useless. unless you can identify the specific product and give me a number, this is not useful and I'm better off googling it

Your sorting by price is broken: It's sorting strings, not numbers, and counts "$900" as being higher than "$2000".

I went hunting for "macbook pro i7" and every item I clicked on (something like 4 or 5) had already been sold. It does look like something I would use otherwise(EDIT: as in if I had a better success rate when I clicked).

I remember when SeatGeek presented at TechCrunch Disrupt(?) in 2009, pg took issue at the fact that they didn't use their ticket price data to arbitrage the secondary ticket market. Does Pricenomics use its data to arbitrage any markets, and if not, why should the same criticism not apply?<p>All that aside, Pricenomics looks compelling. Hopefully it will substantially increase the efficiency of second hand "stuff" markets.

Note to self: data mining web app; few visual bugs; duplicates; I can see only "Bad News! This Item Already Sold."; no info where an ad comes from; they use jquery; actually <a href="http://www.shopobot.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.shopobot.com/</a> by nostromo looks better (but they just focuse on amazon price monitoring);

I think it's a great idea and wish these guys success. But isn't eBay (and perhaps Craigslist) in a <i>much</i> better position to provide this functionality? They have enormous historical databases on the prices of things.

I searched 'iPod' and there were no results. Why would they launch a half-baked website 3 days before Christmas? They should have admitted they missed the holidays and polished things up before launching.

At first glance I didn't see anything that searching ebay with "show only expired auctions" wouldn't also give me. But it is probably still early days...

Congrats on the launch guys. We do something similar but for different online markets -- most commonly Amazon -- (e.g.: <a href="http://www.shopobot.com/tv/" rel="nofollow">http://www.shopobot.com/tv/</a>). One of our most common user requests is to provide this info for CraigsList and Ebay, so I'm sure you'll find success there.

Cool! 'Macbook Air' did not return a result though :(

Price for EVERYTHING? But no commodities, oil, coffee, etc.

I used to be "kind-of-a" used car dealer, and I always thought I could build this same product to help get a better idea of how much to bid on cars at the auction. Basically it would get current listings on CL in my city for model ZYX from YY to YY. Knowing how many similar rides are on the market and the average asking price is great insight.

So it's yet another price comparison site. What's so special about it?

Do you guys actually have any products available or is this just an email harvesting launch? I ask because I tried a lot of items and they were all sold out. :-)<p>I'm impressed by your courage to launch with a half-baked product like this. I wish I could do the same.