HammerAlert: One calendar for 150+ auction houses worldwide

Hi everyone — I'm Laurens, the founder of HammerAlert. I built this because following the global auction calendar means subscribing to roughly fifty different house newsletters. Each only covers their own sales, many duplicate each other in the broad seasons (May/November jewellery, March/October contemporary art), and the marketing-heavy emails arrive months ahead for sales you may not care about. There was no single place to ask "what's on this week across Christie's, Sotheby's, Bonhams, Drouot and the long tail of regional houses?" HammerAlert pulls calendars from 150+ auction houses worldwide, deduplicates listings, classifies them by category (jewellery, watches, modern + contemporary, wine, Asian art, etc.) and region, and lets you subscribe to just the slices you care about as an ICS feed that shows up in Apple Calendar / Google Calendar / Outlook. Free, no signup required to browse. Signup only if you want a personalised feed. Hard parts so far: 1. Scrapers for 150+ source sites that change their HTML weekly, some lazy-loading via JavaScript so Playwright + browser rendering is needed. 2. Dedupe — "Modern & Contemporary Day Sale" vs "Modern + Contemporary Afternoon Session" across houses without merging things that shouldn't be merged. 3. Inferring location and category from titles ranging from "Jewels" to "Important Magnificent Jewels Including The XYZ Collection". Happy to answer questions on architecture, scraping at scale, the dedup approach, or the calendar UX. — Laurens