Keep this bid so it is still here when the customer calls back. Every number on this form is saved together, under a name you choose, along with the figure it gave you, and restoring one puts the whole job back exactly as you priced it. Mark each one won or lost when you hear — the ones you have not heard back on stay listed as waiting, with how long they have been out. Once a few have come back, this panel says how long yours actually take, and how many are still out past that. Once enough of them have been decided, it also says whether the bids you save here have been landing differently lately than they used to.
Kept in this browser only, on this site’s own storage. Nothing is uploaded, and clearing your browser data clears it — download a backup to keep a copy or open your bids on another device. Bids are kept per tool, so these are the ones you saved here.
FOR STORAGE AUCTION BUYERS
The 20%-of-value rule can bid you past your own break-even before you've paid for a dump run.
A lien-auction unit is sold sight-mostly-unseen, and every forum repeats the same rule: don't bid more than 20-30% of what it's worth. That rule skips the buyer's premium charged on top of your bid, prices "worth" at retail instead of realistic resale recovery, and has no room at all for dump, labor, transport and holding cost. This free calculator prices the real cost stack and reports what it actually supports. Nothing you type leaves your browser.
This unit
What to bid
$0.00
Break-even bid (0% margin)
Rule-of-thumb bid (naive)
Net resale revenue expected
Cleanout & holding cost (cash)
Your planned bid
Buyer's premium on that bid
Total out-of-pocket at that bid
Profit at that bid
Margin at that bid
Cleanout wall-clock time needed
A planning figure from the numbers you typed, not an appraisal or a guarantee of resale. It does not add sales tax, income tax, or your own time spent researching and listing beyond the hourly labor rate you entered.
Bought jewelry or scrap in the unit? The scrap gold buy price calculator works out what a lot of gold is worth after the refiner's cut and fees.
Private by default
Everything on this page runs in your browser. Your value estimate, bid, and cost numbers are never uploaded, there is no account, and nothing is saved when you close the tab. Copy shareable link is the one way these figures leave this device, and only because you choose to send them: they ride in the page's URL fragment, which a browser never puts in a request line or a Referer header. We count only anonymous local feature events (bid-calculated, overbid-warning-shown, link_copied) so we can tell whether the calculator gets used — no values, bids, or unit details are recorded, and Do Not Track / Global Privacy Control turn it off automatically.
Common questions
Is the winning bid what I actually pay?
No. Lien-auction platforms and most in-person auctioneers charge a buyer's premium on top of your hammer bid, commonly 10-15%. If you bid $400 with a 12% premium, your actual purchase price is $448, not $400. This calculator applies the premium to every figure it reports, so the ceiling it gives you is a hammer bid, and the total-outlay figure next to your planned bid already includes the premium.
Why isn't the max bid just a percentage of what the contents are worth?
Because a flat percentage skips two real cuts and ignores a real cost stack. What the contents would fetch new or with time to negotiate is not what a stranger's used goods net on a resale deadline — that is the recovery rate. What they do net is then cut again by resale channel and payment fees. And the cash cost of dump runs, a truck, cleanout labor and holding inventory while you sell it does not scale with the unit's value at all, so a percentage rule has no room for it — which is exactly backwards on a small or hard-to-sell unit, the outcome you cannot rule out sight-unseen.
What is the difference between the break-even bid and the max bid at my target margin?
The break-even bid is the hammer price at which this deal nets exactly $0 profit — the absolute ceiling past which every extra dollar is a loss. The max bid at your target margin is lower: it is the bid that leaves your required profit margin on the table, not just avoids a loss. Bidding between the two can still be a real deal, just a thinner one than your target; bidding past the break-even bid is a loss no matter how the resale goes.
What happens if I don't clean out the unit in time?
Facilities set a removal window — commonly 24 to 72 hours — and most require a refundable cleanout deposit that you forfeit if you miss it or leave the unit in bad condition, sometimes alongside being barred from future auctions there. This calculator divides your total cleanout labor hours by your crew size to get the wall-clock hours the job actually takes, and flags it when that exceeds the facility's window, so the deposit risk is a number you see before you bid, not a surprise the next morning.
Does anything about my bid or my numbers get uploaded?
No. Every field on this page runs in your browser only, there is no account, and nothing you type is uploaded. Nothing leaves this device unless you choose to send it: the Copy shareable link button puts the figures on the form into the page's URL fragment, which a browser never sends to a server or into a Referer header, so it reaches only the person you hand the link to. Usage counting only tallies anonymous feature events, and you can turn it off with the button below.
Want the margin, walk-away price and overrun headroom as well, or pricing a different trade? Price this job in the Bid Price Engine, one calculator for 121 trades.