AI Pricing Tool Lists Used Item Above New Price Due to Rate-Limited Search Engine

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A developer running a self-hosted AI tool to price second-hand eBay items discovered it had recommended listing a used Raspberry Pi case at £35.39 — 31% above its £26.99 new retail price. The error occurred because the tool's retail anchor, designed to prevent overpricing, relied on a single price-comparison source accessed via a rate-limited search engine that had been unresponsive all day. Without the anchor's corrective signal, the system priced solely from nine live asking prices ranging up to £240, producing a misleading result. Attempts to manually input the retail price exposed further bugs in the notes parser, where condition keywords like 'new' conflicted with price annotations, requiring regex fixes. The incident highlights how silent infrastructure failures in automated pricing systems can go unnoticed until a listing is already live.

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