About Booty Bay Broker
The story behind the World of Warcraft Auction House price tracker — who built it, why it exists, and how to get in touch.
Table of Contents
About Booty Bay Broker
Booty Bay Broker is a free, independently built World of Warcraft Auction House price analytics platform. The site tracks current and historical prices for the tradeable items the collector sees across the US and EU realms it scans, on a per-edition collection cadence detailed under How It Works — covering WoW Retail (Midnight), MoP Classic, TBC Anniversary Classic, and Season of Discovery.
The site was born from a simple frustration: manually checking AH prices across multiple characters and realms is impractical, and without historical context, it is impossible to know whether a price is fair. The site solves that by collecting regular snapshots from every supported realm, normalizing prices to per-unit values, computing market statistics (median, mean, minimum, maximum, and listing count), and storing up to one full year of history. The result is a searchable, chartable view of the WoW economy available to every player for free.
Data sources and methodology are described in How It Works below.
The code is private and maintained by one developer. What is public is the record it produces: every US and EU realm's latest collection time is published under Data Freshness, and notable changes are written up in the Changelog. The service is supported by advertising — there are no premium tiers, no paywalled data, and no accounts required to browse prices.
For a full walkthrough of features, data methodology, and how to use the site, see the Guide.
How It Works
An automated data collection pipeline runs across all supported realms in both the US and EU regions on version-specific cadences. Each collection cycle captures a snapshot of the buyout listings the API returns — tens of thousands of items per realm, and every snapshot is kept for one full year. Bid-only auctions are not included, and a listing that appears and sells between two snapshots is never seen.
Data Sources
WoW Retail data comes directly from the official Blizzard Battle.net Game Data API. This is the same first-party data that powers the in-game Auction House. Retail data includes both realm-specific auctions and region-wide commodity listings.
WoW Classic data (MoP Classic, TBC Anniversary, and Season of Discovery) comes from the TradeSkillMaster (TSM) API, the most widely used economy addon in the WoW Classic community. Classic realms include faction-specific Auction Houses (Horde and Alliance), and both are tracked independently.
Data Processing
Raw auction data is processed into per-item statistics for each realm and snapshot: market value, median price, minimum price, maximum price, standard deviation, and total listing count. Buyout prices are normalized to per-unit values so that bulk listings are comparable to single-item listings. These statistics are stored as a time series in a PostgreSQL database backed by TimescaleDB, optimized for fast historical queries across large date ranges.
The processed data powers interactive price history charts, cross-realm price comparisons, trading-hour heatmaps, and a searchable item database. The exact timestamp of the most recent data update is displayed on every Auction House page so you always know how current the prices are.
Price history is retained for up to one full year, allowing you to analyze seasonal trends, patch-day price spikes, and long-term market shifts. For a detailed walkthrough of every feature, see the Guide.
Why Trust This Data
Selling herbs, evaluating transmog, or comparing consumable costs across realms before a raid night — the numbers need to be reliable. This is how we keep them honest.
Named Sources
Retail prices come from Blizzard’s API. Classic prices come from TradeSkillMaster’s aggregated player scans. Both are real listings, not predictions, and derived numbers say so where they appear. Market value is our estimate of what an item is worth, read from the auction listings we can see rather than from completed sales — on Retail, the quantity-weighted average of the current listings with high outliers discarded; on the Classic editions, TradeSkillMaster’s market value for the selected realm and faction, which weights the lowest-priced listings and trims outliers. That is how the number is meant on every page, and the Auction House guide’s glossary defines it in full. How It Works names the exact source behind each game version.
Regular Collection, Per-Unit Normalization
Collection runs on a fixed per-version cadence — hourly for Retail and TBC Anniversary, daily for MoP Classic, and about twice a day for Season of Discovery. What each snapshot captures, and how buyouts are normalized to a per-unit price before any statistic is computed, is set out under How It Works.
Documented Methodology
The code is private and maintained by one developer, so the checks that matter are on the output rather than the source. How It Works sets out the collection and normalization steps behind every number, Data Freshness shows the most recent successful collection for every US and EU realm, and the Changelog records the notable changes and when they shipped, so the release history is there to read.
Transparent Limitations
No data source is perfect. Periodic snapshots may miss very short-lived listings. Classic data depends on TSM scanning coverage, which can vary by realm population. Commodity prices (region-wide trade goods in Retail) fluctuate quickly and each snapshot represents a point-in-time view, not a continuous feed.
The Creator
TheMizeGuy
Founder, Lead Developer, and Sole Maintainer
A full-stack software engineer and longtime World of Warcraft player who has been active in the game since the original launch in 2004. What began as a personal project to automate Auction House price tracking — born out of frustration with having to manually check prices across multiple characters and realms — has grown into a price tracker that monitors hundreds of realm economies across multiple WoW game versions.
Crafters need per-unit normalized prices; transmog sellers need historical volume data; guild leaders need to compare consumable prices across weekly reset cycles — every feature exists because a real trading workflow demanded it. The codebase is actively maintained; the Changelog shows what changed and when.
Contact
We welcome questions, feedback, bug reports, and feature suggestions. Here are the best ways to reach us:
- Bug Reports and Feature Requests — Send bug reports, feature requests, and technical questions to our support email. Every report is reviewed and addressed by the maintainer.
- Email — support@bootybaybroker.com — For general inquiries, partnership questions, data-related requests, or privacy and security concerns. We aim to respond to all emails within 48 hours.
- X (formerly Twitter) — @realmizeguy — For quick questions, service status updates, or casual feedback.
Attribution and Disclaimers
Retail Auction House data is provided by the Blizzard Battle.net Game Data API. Classic data is provided by the TradeSkillMaster (TSM) API.
World of Warcraft and Blizzard Entertainment are trademarks or registered trademarks of Blizzard Entertainment, Inc. in the United States and other countries. Booty Bay Broker is not affiliated with or endorsed by Blizzard Entertainment. All game-related imagery, item names, and in-game terminology are the property of their respective owners and are used here under fair use for the purpose of community price analysis.
TradeSkillMaster is a product of TSM. Classic pricing data is sourced through their API under their terms of service.