About BidVault

BidVault is an online auction platform built around a single idea: that every fee should be visible before a user commits to a bid. The industry standard, inherited from the early days of online auctions, is that buyer's premiums, seller commissions, listing charges and reserve fees are disclosed only when the user has already scrolled past the bid button, or when the invoice arrives. BidVault does the opposite.

The platform was designed and built as a final-year computer science project at Aston University, with the aim of demonstrating that a modern auction service can be simultaneously transparent, easy to operate and professionally engineered. The technology stack is Laravel with PostgreSQL for the database, Alpine.js for light client-side interactivity and a custom design system rather than a heavy UI framework. The result is a platform that loads quickly, works on mobile out of the box and stays readable when the fee schedule needs to be adjusted.

What we do differently

• Every fee — listing fee, commission, buyer's premium, VAT — is shown on the auction page before a bid is placed.
• Fees are snapshotted per auction at publish time, so a change to the platform's fee schedule never retroactively affects a live auction.
• Collection addresses stay private until payment has cleared, so sellers don't have their home addresses exposed to the whole internet.
• Auctions can extend automatically if a bid is placed near the end time, so there's no benefit to sniping in the last five seconds.

Who built it

BidVault was built by Hubert Walczak as an undergraduate final-year project. The source code, including the deployment configuration and the full admin surface, is published on GitHub under the author's academic account.