Looking for a Gixen alternative with a better free tier, the same paid price, and no need to hand over your eBay password? Zero Hour is the only one that ticks all three. Gixen Free caps at 4 winning snipes per month and shows ads. Zero Hour Free has unlimited monthly wins, no ads, no signup, and never asks for your eBay password, so there is no third-party database holding your eBay login. The paid tiers are identical at $2.95 per month, but Zero Hour also offers a one-time $49 lifetime plan that Gixen does not have.
Best for: Gixen users who've ever felt a moment of hesitation while typing their eBay password into someone else's website. Or who maintain a separate "decoy" eBay account specifically because Gixen has their main one.
Not ideal for: users who close their browser overnight and need a server-side service that fires bids while their computer is off.
How Gixen works (and what you have to trust)
Gixen is a web app at gixen.com. You create a Gixen account with an email and password. Then, separately, you enter your eBay username and password into Gixen's settings page. Gixen stores those credentials on its servers in Florida. When an auction nears its close, Gixen's server signs into your eBay account on your behalf and places the bid.
The model is simple, the price is reasonable ($2.95/month for unlimited fault-tolerant snipes), and the service has 20 years of operational track record. The one architectural fact about Gixen that nothing on their site can change:
- Your eBay credentials are stored on Gixen's server. They've never had a public breach, but the data is sitting there.
- Bids fire from Gixen's servers' IP addresses, which sometimes triggers eBay's risk engine. This is a known issue documented across Reddit threads.
- If Gixen's server is down at the moment of your snipe, the snipe doesn't fire. Gixen runs redundant infrastructure to mitigate this, but it's still infrastructure you depend on.
- You have to trust Gixen with the same password you use for everything else. Many Gixen users maintain a separate eBay account just for sniping as a workaround.
How Zero Hour solves it
Zero Hour is a Chrome extension, not a website. The bid fires from your own machine, using your own browser, with your own eBay cookies. There is no Zero Hour server in the bid-placement loop at all.
Specifically:
- No Zero Hour account to sign up for. The free tier needs nothing past installing the extension. Pro asks for the email you pay with at Stripe checkout, used only to bind Pro to your install.
- No place to type your eBay password. There is literally no input field for it anywhere in the extension.
- Bids fire from your IP. eBay sees them exactly as if you'd placed them manually.
- Your snipe data lives in
chrome.storage.localon your computer. Uninstall the extension and it's all gone.
The one practical difference
Gixen's server fires bids even when your computer is off. Zero Hour fires them from your browser, so the browser needs to be running. Once your computer is set to not sleep, you're set. The two-click adjustment for Mac and Windows is on the setup page. In exchange, Zero Hour never asks for your eBay password, because it bids from your own browser session.
Feature-by-feature
Pricing and the free-tier reality
Gixen Free: free, capped at 4 winning snipes per month, ad-supported dashboard, single-server reliability, and Gixen still wants your eBay password to use it. Gixen Mirror (paid): $2.95/month, unlimited snipes with two-server fault-tolerance, still requires your eBay password. Zero Hour Free: 1 active snipe at a time, unlimited monthly wins, no ads, no signup, no eBay password. Zero Hour Pro Monthly: $2.95/month. Zero Hour Pro Lifetime: $49 once. $2.95/month matches Gixen's paid tier exactly, but Zero Hour's free tier is the only one with no monthly win ceiling. The lifetime plan is the clear winner past 17 months ($2.95 x 17 = $50.15 in Gixen subscription fees vs $49 once on Zero Hour). Gixen has no lifetime option at all.
Reliability
Gixen claims roughly 95 to 98% reliability depending on plan. Zero Hour targets the same window, closer to 99.5% under typical conditions (browser running, computer awake, eBay session valid). The failure modes differ: Gixen's is server outages; Zero Hour's is the browser being closed at the wrong moment.
UI
Gixen's interface predates flat design. It works, but every interaction goes through a full page load. Zero Hour is a 400x600 popup that responds instantly. Every state transition is animated, every countdown ticks live, and every result is visible without leaving the popup.
Auditability
Gixen is closed source. You trust the binary that runs on their servers. Zero Hour ships unminified. Right-click the icon, choose Inspect popup, open Sources, and you'll see the actual code firing your bids. Completely different transparency models.
Multi-region support
Both work on every eBay regional marketplace (all 18 TLDs, including .com, .co.uk, .com.au, .de, .nl, .be, .com.sg, and others). Both handle currency conversion correctly when placing bids in non-USD listings.
Group bidding
Gixen supports grouped snipes ("snipe this OR this OR this, stop after one wins"). Zero Hour does not in v1. It's a planned v2 feature once single-snipe UX is fully polished.
What Gixen does better
To be fair:
- Sniping while your computer is off. Server-side wins this outright.
- Group bids and OR-snipes. Mature on Gixen.
- 20 years of reputation. Gixen has been operating since 2006; Zero Hour launched in 2026.
- 20 years of accumulated features (group bids, OR-snipes, multi-account) that Zero Hour hasn't matched yet.
Migrating from Gixen
The migration takes about three minutes:
- Install Zero Hour from the Chrome Web Store.
- In Gixen, cancel any active snipes you'd like to move. No need to delete the account if you'd prefer to keep both running.
- For each item, paste the URL into Zero Hour's Add Snipe sheet. Set your max. Save.
- Optional: in Gixen, change your eBay password (since they've had it). Your browser will pick up the new session automatically.
If you're moving permanently, deleting your Gixen account also removes your eBay credentials from their database.