CtrlK
Posted at March 29, 2026 - Updated 4 months ago
We’ve completed 3 years!!!! Time really flies, doesn’t it? In this special Patch Notes, we’ll talk a bit about recent changes and our vision for the future.
We’re very happy with the latest major update to our pricing algorithm. Incorporating auction results into price estimates has proven to be the right decision, and we can now price UB items much faster.
Looking Ahead
While expensive items are 👍👍👍👍, very cheap items are struggling. We understand your frustration and, in fact, our algorithm is intentionally slower to update very low-priced items (generally below 100k). In a future update, we will give special attention to these cases.
This was a big change that broke many userscripts and generated several posts on Reddit and the r/neopets Discord.
Our intention has always been to try to separate legitimate uses (such as userscripts, Discord bots, and similar) from suspicious uses (for example, we’ve already seen some AI crawlers making requests to our API).
We also adjusted the rate limit during the process to reduce the main pain points of the change. For comparison, between Saturday, March 21 (before the API changes) and Saturday, March 28, we saw a 65.5% reduction in the number of requests blocked by rate limiting.
Between Monday, March 23 (the day of the change) and Saturday, March 28, there was a 1/3 reduction in requests hitting the rate limit.
We also launched the Troubleshooting Tool to help reduce the pain points of the change and to allow script users to quickly identify whether an issue is related to itemdb and the API or to a browser extension configuration.
The chip shortage driven by AI is affecting the entire tech sector, and it has impacted us as well. Our server costs are expected to increase by around 28% due to the chip shortage (even though we haven’t made any changes to our servers, heh).
Our infrastructure relies on two VPS (Virtual Private Servers) which, together, handle nearly 2 million requests every day (many of these coming from AI crawlers that ignore our explicit request not to use our data for AI, heh).
At the moment, we’re happy with our server provider (netcup), and the costs — even for a hobby project — are still comfortable for us to afford so itemdb isn’t going anywhere.
We are an open-source project — which means anyone can make changes and, once approved, they become available to everyone.
However, there were several barriers preventing people from running a local copy of itemdb. That’s why we made a series of changes to improve the developer experience:
.env.default documentation and README.md to provide more detailed step-by-step instructions for getting your local copy up and running.In theory, you now only need a few minutes to get your local copy of itemdb running (instead of an entire afternoon).
Our recent update that added support for massive official lists has opened up a whole new world of possibilities: creating dynamic lists based on filters applied to an existing list.
Example: from the list of all plushies → filter only Kougra plushies
(this already works today, but there’s currently no way to create a new list from that result)
and also:
and things we explored but didn’t move forward with:
A deep dive on how our prices work and how we’re improving it
Explore our userscripts to level up your Neopian experience! These scripts are safe and won’t break any rules by taking actions on Neopets for you.
You can find the Owls Value by browsing NC items on itemdb, but what is it?