Live auction software, for an auction somebody is actually calling.

Two things are called a live auction, and they are not the same

The first is a silent auction with a clock on it. Lots open, a timer runs, the highest bid when it stops wins. Nobody is speaking. Almost every platform that advertises live auction software means this one, and it is genuinely useful.

The second is an auction. Somebody is calling it. The pace is theirs, not a timer’s: they put a lot up, watch the bids land, decide when it is finished and knock it down. That is the shape this page is about, and it is the one most software cannot do at all, because a countdown cannot be persuaded to wait while an auctioneer works a room.

And there is a third shape, which is neither: no room at all, the auction called to camera and broadcast to several platforms at once. That has its own page, because the software problem is genuinely different once nobody is in the building: virtual auction software.

The auctioneer needs a console, not a dashboard

Ours is called the Rostrum. Every lot on one screen with its live price and who is winning it, built for a phone held one-handed at seven in the evening, because that is what an auctioneer is actually holding. One tap puts a lot up. Two taps sell it, and the second tap is deliberate, because selling is the one thing you cannot take back with a shrug.

Undo exists anyway, for ten minutes, for the tap that lands on the wrong row. It refuses once the winner has paid, at which point it is not a mis-tap, it is a refund, and that belongs in the accounts rather than on the console.

Bids from the room, competing with bids from the sofa

This is the part that decides whether the software is any use. An auctioneer with a room in front of him has to be able to take a bid from somebody standing there, and it has to compete with everybody watching at home in the same lot, on the same price.

He does not stop to ask their name. Nobody has ever run an auction that way, and a lot loses its shape the moment somebody is asked to spell an email address. So a bid from the floor carries no identity at all; the paddle is matched to a person afterwards, from a queue built for exactly that.

A clock, when you want one

Any lot can be put up with sixty seconds on it and closed the moment it runs out. It is worth having for the middle of an evening, where a deadline short enough to watch does more than talking louder.

Anti-snipe is the trap here, and it is worth knowing that we walked into it. The usual guard extends a lot when a bid lands near the end, by default two minutes. On a sixty-second lot that guard is longer than the whole auction, so every bid extends it and the clock never reaches zero. A flash lot carries its own guard, sized against its own length.

Watching, on a page that is not YouTube

Guests at home get the stream and the lot side by side, with the bidding controls under the thumb. The lot panel sits beside the video rather than on top of it, because text over a moving picture is unreadable and a bid button floating over a stream is a button people mis-tap.

The bid buttons offer a stated amount rather than opening a box that asks for a maximum. In a live auction the auctioneer is calling a number and the viewer is answering it. “What is the most you would pay?” is the wrong question mid-call, and it loses the bid.

What it costs, and whose money it is

You enter your own Stripe keys, so every payment lands in the charity’s own account. We never hold your donors’ money and we add no transaction fee of our own. The platform is included in every engagement, and available on its own.

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