AuctionLens

AuctionLens keeps a price history for your realm's auction house, built entirely from your own scans, and draws it as charts you can actually read.

It's read-only. It will never buy, post, or cancel anything.

Scanning

It runs a full scan when you open the auction house, if the cooldown allows. That cooldown is 15 minutes per account and it's Blizzard's, not mine. If you already run another addon that does full scans, AuctionLens records those instead of spending a scan of its own.

Progress shows in the bottom right corner of the auction house window, so you're not left wondering whether anything is happening.

Finding things

The item list is nested the way the auction house's own browse panel is: item class, then subclass, then equip slot. Random-suffix gear — all those "of the Bear" variants — collapses under the item it belongs to instead of filling the list with near-duplicates.

Click an item for candle charts over 48 hours, 7 days, 30 days, 90 days or a year, with volume underneath and a crosshair that reads out the price wherever you point it.

Crafting

Open a profession window once and AuctionLens knows your recipes. It then works out what each one costs in reagents against what the product actually sells for, with the auction house cut taken off.

Reagents are priced at the lowest buyout, because that's what you'd really pay. Products are priced at what you'd have to match to sell, not at market value. Pricing both sides at market value makes almost everything look profitable, and most of it isn't.

A panel opens beside the profession window with the margins ranked, and highlights anything above a threshold you set.

Tooltips

Price, how many are listed, which way both are moving, and how old the numbers are. Any line can be switched off, and there are more you can switch on: lowest buyout, turnover, the 7-day range, what a typical stack is worth, craft margin, and a few others.

Getting at it

There's a settings tab in the main window, a minimap button, and a Lens button on the auction house frame. Everything in settings is also available from the command line if you'd rather type.

About the numbers

Two things worth knowing before you trust anything in here.

Volume is turnover, not sales. The game never tells an addon that something sold. All any addon can see is that units which were listed last scan aren't listed now. That includes expiries, and it includes people cancelling and relisting. I measured it across four scans on a live realm: at least a third of what gets counted as "sold" came straight back within 20 minutes. The UI calls it turnover for that reason. It's a reasonable signal for whether an item moves at all. It is not a sales figure, and I'd rather say so than have you make a decision on it.

Market value is a buying price, not a selling price. It's the weighted median of the cheapest quarter of listed units, which is roughly what you'd pay to acquire something. What you can sell for is lower, because you have to undercut to do it. The craft margins already account for that. Keep it in mind anywhere else.

History starts when you do. There's no server-side price database to download. Every number comes from scans run on your own account, so the first week is thin and there's nothing I can do about that.

Known issues

• Storage runs to about 26 MB per fully populated market at 90 days of history. That's more than I want it to be. Compaction is the next thing I'm working on.
• Roughly 8% of rows come back from the server before their item data has loaded. Those get recorded under the plain item ID and lose their random-suffix variant.
• This is an alpha on a brand new client, and several of the APIs it needs aren't confirmed on Forever yet. Where one is missing you'll see a gap — an "Unclassified" bucket in the item list, a panel that explains why it's empty — rather than a screen full of Lua errors.

Coming next

Gold tracking: where your money came from and where it went, per character, including auction house fees and what your listings actually sold for rather than what you hoped they would. It's written and tested. It needs verifying against a live client before I'm willing to ship it.

Bug reports and feature requests are welcome in the comments. If something breaks, /alens probe prints what the client does and doesn't support, and that output tells me more than a screenshot will.