eBay dropped all fees for the use of its API starting November 14, 2005. You can find a lot of announcements about that on the net. I've put together a small note on that myself on my [not related to puzzles] site that I recently started: http://www.hashdef.com/blog/2005/11/14/25/ I guess we will see more of interesting and useful eBay tools now that everything can be done reliably via the API.

http://developer.ebay.com/faq/bidding

So the sniping tools might not be able to use the API. But someone could develop a script for Sandy for the tracking database. You just have to enter in an auction for it to watch and it can monitor it until it's done and record the final price.

Yes, that was my thought as well, that we could possibly track the prices automatically now.