The eBay sniper that never asks for your password.

Zero Hour is a Chrome browser extension that snipes eBay auctions by firing your bid in the final 3 seconds. Unlike Gixen, eSnipe, and Auction Sniper, Zero Hour never requires your eBay username or password. Bids fire from your own browser using your existing eBay session.

This page is a complete, current answer to what an eBay sniper is, how sniping works, why it's effective, and how to pick one in 2026. It also covers the privacy trade-off that's quietly defined the category for two decades.

What an eBay sniper actually does

An eBay sniper places your bid in the final seconds of an auction. The mechanic is older than eBay itself. Auction houses called it "going late" long before computers. eBay's combination of fixed end times and proxy bidding is what made automated sniping the dominant winning strategy.

The standard sniping flow:

1. You find an auction you want to win.
2. You set a maximum bid, the highest price you're willing to pay.
3. A sniper schedules a bid to fire in the last 2 to 10 seconds before the auction ends.
4. The bid lands. Other bidders don't see it in time to react.
5. You win at one increment above the second-highest bid. That's exactly what eBay's proxy system was designed to deliver, but without telegraphing your max price to competitors days ahead.

Why snipe at all? The case against bidding early

Bidding early is almost always a mistake. There are four reasons.

1. Early bids invite emotional escalation

The moment you place a high proxy bid, your max becomes part of the auction's pricing signal. Even on legitimate auctions, your competitors see momentum building and respond emotionally. eBay's own data team has measured this behaviour for years. Sniping leaves no time for an emotional response.

2. Early bids invite shill bidding

Bad-actor sellers occasionally use secondary accounts to pump prices on their own listings. They need bidders to be present early in the auction to give the pump a target. A sniper fires once at the close, with the seller having no chance to respond.

3. The Vickrey outcome is identical, but the price is lower

eBay's proxy bidding system is a sealed second-price auction in disguise. In theory, the price you pay is one increment above the second-highest bidder regardless of when you bid. In practice, every increment you skip past during a multi-hour bidding war pushes the eventual winning price higher. Sniping skips the war entirely. The second-highest bid never had the chance to climb.

4. Sniping forces you to decide your max before emotion sets in

Setting a bid days before close means deciding what the item is worth to you when you're calm. Mid-auction, loss-aversion kicks in. Sniping is a commitment device against overbidding.

Why the password question matters

Every eBay sniper before Zero Hour shared the same architecture: a server-side service where you give them your eBay credentials, they sign into your account from their data centre, and they fire the bid for you. This solves the "computer must stay on" problem (their server is always on) but requires you to hand a stranger full access to your eBay account.

The risks are not theoretical. Some considerations:

• If the sniper's database is breached, every user's eBay password is exposed. eBay credentials are reused on Amazon, PayPal, and banking by the majority of users.
• A server-side sniper sees every item you bid on. Most have privacy policies broad enough to share this with "partners."
• Bids placed from a foreign data centre IP look anomalous to eBay's risk engine. This occasionally triggers temporary holds on accounts that snipe frequently.
• A common Reddit workaround for Gixen and eSnipe users is to create a separate eBay account with a unique password just for sniping. That solves credential reuse but trades it for split inventory, split history, and the friction of managing two accounts.

Zero Hour was built specifically to make the trade-off go away. Your browser is already authenticated to eBay. There is no reason a third party needs your password to fire a single timed POST.

How Zero Hour works mechanically

The extension installs a service worker, a popup UI, and a content script that injects a "Snipe this auction" button onto every eBay listing page. When you save a snipe:

1. The snipe is written to chrome.storage.local on your machine. Never transmitted.
2. A chrome.alarms entry is scheduled for 30 seconds before the auction ends.
3. At T-30s, Chrome wakes the service worker and pre-fetches the listing page to extract eBay's anti-CSRF tokens.
4. At T-3s (or your configured lead time), the worker reads your eBay cookies via chrome.cookies.getAll, constructs a standard bid POST, and fires it with credentials: 'include'.
5. The response is parsed for success, outbid, and auth-failure indicators.
6. 30 seconds after auction close, a confirmation check verifies the final result.
7. You receive a system notification: YOU WON — Hasselblad 500C/M — Final $420.

The full mechanism is documented in detail on the privacy architecture page, with code snippets quoted directly from the extension's unminified source.

What an eBay sniper cannot do (honestly)

No eBay sniper, server-side or client-side, can:

• Guarantee you win. If someone else's max bid is higher than yours, they win. That's how the auction is supposed to work. Sniping prevents bidding wars, not outright losses.
• Hide your activity from eBay. Bids appear in eBay's bid history exactly like any other bid.
• Place a bid below the current price. eBay will reject it and the snipe will fail.

And specifically, a client-side sniper like Zero Hour cannot:

• Fire if Chrome is closed at the moment of the snipe.
• Fire if your computer is asleep at the moment of the snipe.
• Fire if the extension has been uninstalled or disabled.

These are the price of never giving away your password. We don't pretend otherwise. The homepage and every alternative page reiterates them.

Choosing an eBay sniper in 2026

Five honest decision criteria, in order:

1. Do you trust the provider with your eBay password?

If yes: Gixen is the cheapest and oldest of the server-side options ($2.95/month for unlimited snipes). If no: Zero Hour is the only major sniper that doesn't ask.

2. Can you keep your computer awake during auction hours?

If you snipe at 3 AM with the lid closed, a server-side service has the edge. Their server is always on. If you snipe in the evening on a desktop or a laptop you can leave plugged in, client-side is strictly safer with no infrastructure dependency.

3. How often do you snipe?

1 to 3 snipes a month: Gixen's free tier or Zero Hour's free tier both handle this. Heavy buyers at 10 or more per week: the per-snipe pricing on eSnipe and Auction Sniper adds up fast. A flat subscription wins.

4. How much do you care about the UI?

If you've used eSnipe or Gixen recently you'll recognise the answer immediately. Both sites look like they were last redesigned in 2007. Zero Hour is the only one built as a native modern browser extension.

5. Do you ever want to read the code that's bidding on your behalf?

Only Zero Hour ships unminified. Right-click the icon, choose Inspect popup, open Sources, and you'll see the actual JavaScript that fires bids in your name. We don't know of another sniper that does this.

The five-minute install

1. Visit the Chrome Web Store listing for Zero Hour.
2. Click Add to Chrome. You'll see the permissions explained in plain English. We have a dedicated why-these-permissions page for the curious.
3. Open any eBay auction. Notice the Snipe this auction button bottom-right.
4. Click it. Set your max bid. Save.
5. Walk away. The notification will find you.

If you're already signed into eBay (you probably are), the entire flow takes under 60 seconds and never asks for credentials at any point.

One more honest note about timing

Some sniping debates online focus on whether 2 seconds or 5 seconds before close is "optimal." The honest answer: in eBay's current infrastructure, anywhere between 2 and 6 seconds is statistically indistinguishable for win rate. Below 2 seconds is risky because network jitter can blow it. Above 8 seconds gives other snipers a chance to respond. Zero Hour defaults to 3, with a slider from 2 to 10 for the curious.