Announcing the Prosper Bid Sniper (beta)
I’ve created a standalone PHP application that can be used to snipe bids on Prosper. Sniping is the practice of bidding on loans as late as possible so that your funds aren’t tied up unnecessarily. The portfolio tool that Prosper provides bids on listings as soon as they meet all of your criteria. Such a listing may have 7 days left, so your money is committed to that bid for those seven days.
With bid sniping, you program your bids to be placed only during the last hour that a listing is available. This ties up your funds for a shorter period of time, meaning that you can bid on more listings, or have less cash sitting in you non-interest earning cash balance.
This tool is still in an early beta testing period. I believe that it functions properly, but provide no guarantees that it won’t bid on everything that comes along :). Also, note that the listing information available via the Prosper API doesn’t contain all of the fields that their portfolio tool does.
Installation requires you to have your own web hosting. (I’ve confirmed that BlueHost meets the system requirements if you don’t already have a hosting account). Hosting the program yourself is the best way that I know of to verify the security of your Prosper password since it is currently required for the API calls. Care has been taken to encrypt your password when it is saved in the database, and whenever it might be saved on disk or displayed in debug output. Again, however, I make no guarantees that your password is not obtainable. Any person with access to both your configuration file, and your database would be able to decrypt your password. I make no guarantees that an attacker would not be able to read your password via this program. Also, an attacker may be able to read your password due to vulnerabilities in other applications installed on the same server as your program.
The project page is at http://odnal.com/prosper-bid-sniper/ with links to download it on that page. There are still a few things that need to be worked out, but it is functioning well enough now so that others can get a feel for how it works and can hopefully contribute in the form of new features and completing known issues.
