CheepCheep

Abstract

A program that locates a product for sale on the Internet for under $1 with no shipping cost.

The Idea

The idea for this program came from an XKCD comic. In the comic, a guy writes a program to search for an item on the Internet every day that costs, in total, less than $1. It purchases one product each day. With $365 for the year, he gets a new delivery each day, with no idea what might be in it. As demonstrated in the comic, this is not a good idea.

So, what kind of junk does this script find? Click Here to find out. This list updates daily. If you are VERY lucky, you might find something you like.

Implementation

The original version of CheepCheep used Lynx to screen-scrape Google's shopping search. Every time Google changed their layout, it broke. Eventually, Google stopped allowing that kind of scraping completely, and CheepCheep stayed broken for years. After I received emails asking for it back, I rewrote it in November 2026.

The new version is still PHP, but it uses eBay's free Browse API instead of scraping. Every day, it follows a simple algorithm:

1. Read today's top news headlines from Google News and pull out the interesting words. That replaces the old "trending items" lists, which no longer exist.
2. Pick a dozen of those words at random and search eBay for each one, restricted to:
   • Item cost $0.50 to $1.00.
   • Free shipping, so the total cost is never more than $1.
   • Buy It Now only. An auction that starts at $0.99 rarely ends there.
   • Sort from most expensive to least expensive (to get items nearly $1 in cost).
3. Throw out banned items and anything already found under another word.
4. Sort the words from the fewest eBay matches to the most (to get rare items first).
5. Pick one item at random as "today's purchase."

I still have to filter. Many $1 listings are downloads, such as ebooks, printables, and SVG files, which are not something the mail carrier can bring. So, items with words like those in the title are skipped.

Searching with words from the news makes for strange results. A headline about an election might turn up a campaign button from 1984. A headline about a storm might turn up a rain gauge. That is the point. The list still does not show images. To see a product, click its description.

Download

Want to create a CheepCheep site of your own? Want to make this script a hell of a lot better? Want to simply see what kind of cheap junk is for sale on the Internet? Download the program here. Note: the filename is "cc.txt", but you will want to save it as "cc.php".

You will need your own eBay keys. They are free: sign up at developer.ebay.com, create a Production keyset, and put the App ID and Cert ID in a file named cc_config.php. The comments at the top of the script show exactly what that file looks like. Then, run "php cc.php" at the command line to see a list of products, including the name, price, and URL for each one. It will not automatically purchase the products.

FAQ

The following is a list of frequent questions that I receive (and the standard answers that I give.)

When did you start this script?

The first truly functioning version was running in May 2009. The current version was rewritten in November 2026.

What do you do with all the stuff you buy?

I don't buy it anymore. I have too much junk. Instead, I look at the items and, sometimes, I click on the link and make the purchase manually.

Why only eBay?

eBay has a free, official way for programs to search its listings. Google Shopping and Amazon do not, unless you pay or sell things through them. Using an official API also means CheepCheep should not break every time a website is redesigned.

Did you really get this idea from a comic strip?

Not really. I got it from the XKCD Sucks blog, which pretty much challenged someone to write this script - but that challenge was based on an XKCD comic.

Do you have a history of what was purchased each week?

No. After a few days, the listings are old and useless. So, each day's list replaces the last one.

Others

With thousands of people reading the same XKCD comic, it is obvious that others have created their own versions of this program. These are the ones I found over the years:

TradeMe XKCD576

This one saved money when nothing looked interesting so it could spend more than $1. It had a Twitter feed so you could see what it purchased each day.

EBay Bot

A bot that bid $1 on EBay auctions that had no shipping. To my knowledge, it only ran for three weeks before being turned off and the website removed.