Cigar pages
The typical price, the record low, the lowest winning bid and a "worth bidding up to" number, with live lots, full history, Free Fall prices and retail prices side by side.
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★ Case study · Lot No. 04 ★
AshBid
Know what a cigar really sells for.
An independent price tracker for CigarBid auctions, built from a blank folder: the scanner that records every final price, the pages that turn those prices into plain answers, and the tools that tell a bidder when to stop.
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At a glance
- Client
- AshBid, an independent price tracker for CigarBid auctions
- What we did
- Product plan, data design, scanner, website, member tools and testing
- Built with
- Plain PHP and a small Node.js worker, no third-party scripts
- Live site
- ashbid.com ↗
- 336K+ winning prices recorded
- 76,600+ auction lots tracked
- 4,660 cigars and accessories across 307 brands
- 408 automated tests checked against real data
The challenge
CigarBid moves a lot of cigars. What it did not have was a memory.
CigarBid sells cigars at auction three ways: Classic auctions, Free Fall, where the price drops until someone buys, and QuickBuy. A lot with several boxes can have several winners, and each winner pays their own bid.
Once a lot closed, its price was gone. A bidder looking at a box of 25 had no easy way to know what that box usually sells for, what it went for at its cheapest, or when they were about to overpay. The few price numbers floating around were skewed by typo bids and joke bids, so one slip could make a $50 box look like it sells for $90.
The goal was simple to say and hard to build: show the lowest price a cigar really goes for, honestly, on a phone, in the few minutes before an auction closes.
What we built
A public site anyone can use, a members area for people who bid every week, and an admin side that keeps the data honest. Every answer is written for a phone first, because that is where bidding happens.
Brands, lines and packs
Every brand and line has a page, and pack sizes are compared per cigar, so a 5-pack and a box of 25 can be weighed honestly.
Tonight's auctions
Closing-soon lists, tonight's schedule and recent results, so a bidder knows what is ending and what a fair price looks like.
Guides and reports
Best time to bid, cheaper than retail, Free Fall, Won for Less, Biggest Overpays, Oddities, a monthly report and a price index.
Search and tools
Search that takes a pasted lot link and forgives typos, plus a bid calculator, an invoice checker and a bid history checker.
Member alerts
Price alerts by email and push, keyword alerts, a watchlist, followed brands and a Chrome and Firefox extension that shows the price right on the lot.
Behind it, an admin area watches scanner health, data quality, search performance and email delivery, runs a review queue for anything the matcher is unsure of, and installs updates with one button.
Five hard problems
The pages are the easy part. These are the parts that make the numbers worth trusting.
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01
Reading gently
The scanner checks closing lots every minute, open lots every half hour and the full catalog nightly, and backs off when the site is busy. It reads public listing pages only. A pass through older auctions filled in about 58,600 lots, and on October 27 all 917 lots that closed were recorded.
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02
Honest prices
One typo bid can wreck an average. AshBid leaves out any winning bid more than twice a cigar's typical price, then describes the middle of the market in words a bidder can use, like "where 5 of 9 sales land." The typical price is a trimmed, capped average, so one wild night cannot move it.
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03
Lots with more than one winner
When a lot of several boxes closes, several people win at different prices. The highest bid is the easy number to show. AshBid leads with the lowest winning bid, because that is the price you could have had. A 5 Vegas Classic Corona box of 25 typically goes for $45 and has sold for as little as $41.50. On one two-unit lot, the lowest winning bid was $56.50.
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04
The best time to bid
Every sale is compared with that cigar's own typical price, not a raw average, so a cheap cigar and an expensive one count the same. The heatmap covers 5 to 11 PM Central, when lots close, and a square only fills in once it has enough sales to mean something.
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05
Matching the right cigar
Lots are tied to cigars by CigarBid's own product codes. About 7,800 retail listings from Cigars International, Thompson, Famous Smoke and Gotham are matched by size and pack, then compared before they go live. Reviews are matched the same way, with a person checking anything uncertain.
On the screen
Plain answers, fast
Results
Every price, on the record
- 68,300+ lots with a final price
- 917/917 lots recorded on October 27
- 5,650 pages built for search engines
- $6.40 a cigar at auction for an Oliva Serie V Melanio Torpedo, against $18.40 at retail
Records are complete from September 22, 2026. The search pages break down to 4,027 cigars, 838 packs, 470 lines and 296 brands, and thin pages are kept out of Google on purpose.
Under the hood
Version 6 is plain PHP with a small Node.js worker. The front end ships about 19 KB zipped with no third-party scripts, and the whole site runs at 2 to 3 percent CPU and about 550 MB of memory on modest hosting.
Pages carry accurate titles and structured data, and the sitemaps list only pages worth finding. The first commit landed February 23, 2026. More than 560 commits and about 63,000 lines later, 58 test files and 408 automated tests check the math against real auction data, and updates install from GitHub with one button or nightly at 4 AM.
- PHP
- Node.js worker
- Web push alerts
- Chrome and Firefox extension
- Structured data
- 408 automated tests
★ Lot No. 06 ★
Got numbers nobody reads?
We build tools like AshBid for businesses that have the data but not the answers. Tell us what you are sitting on.