The hunt has not gotten harder. It has gotten wider. Prowl is the tool we built so a single search term can be fired at two dozen marketplaces at once, from one screen, for free.
The short version
- One term, twenty-four searches. Type what you are hunting, and Prowl builds it for twenty-three vintage marketplaces plus an eBay Sold search, all on one screen.
- It is free and there is no account. Your saved searches live in your own browser, not in an account.
- Price Check is the part collectors underuse. A ninety-day sold window tells you what a piece actually trades for, not what someone hopes it will.
- Searches are savable. The grails you never stop looking for should not be retyped every Saturday morning.
- Link straight to a term. Every guide on this blog ends with a Prowl link that arrives with the search already filled in.
The problem was never the marketplaces
There has never been more vintage for sale, and there has never been a worse way to look at it. The inventory is real but it is scattered: the auction houses run their own platforms, the estate companies run theirs, the big marketplaces each have a search box that behaves slightly differently, and a piece listed at a fair price on one of them is invisible on the other twenty. A collector who checks only the obvious two is not looking at a smaller market. They are looking at a different one.
The honest workaround, for years, was tabs. Open a browser window on a Sunday morning, type the same phrase into a couple of dozen search boxes, work down the row, close them, and do it again next week. It works. It is also the kind of task that quietly stops happening after a month, which is exactly when the piece you wanted lists for eighty dollars somewhere you forgot to check.
Prowl is that row of tabs, automated. You type once. It fires everywhere.
What it actually searches
Twenty-four searches, plus two extras that sit beside them:
- Twenty-three vintage and antique marketplaces — the general resale platforms, the auction aggregators, the estate-sale networks, and the dealer sites where the better pottery and glass tends to surface first.
- An eBay Sold search — a ninety-day window on completed listings, which is the only number in the whole tool that tells you what something is worth rather than what it is listed at.
- Facebook and Instagram, the wide way — Facebook Marketplace only searches one city at a time, so Facebook USA runs your term in every major metro. Instagram has no marketplace search at all, so Prowl turns your term into a hashtag search for the sellers who post their finds there.
A note on the sold window
Asking prices are aspirations. Sold prices are evidence. If you look at one thing in Prowl, look at the sold tab first and the active listings second — the gap between the two is the single most useful number in collecting, and it is usually much larger than people expect. There is also a three-year deep comps view for pieces that trade rarely enough that ninety days shows you nothing at all.
How collectors actually use it
- Start broad, then tighten. Search "hen on nest" before you search "Atterbury hen on nest glass eyes." Sellers rarely know what they have, and the underpriced pieces are the ones described badly.
- Save the grail searches. Anything you are hunting on a horizon longer than a weekend belongs in a saved search. Saved terms sit in the tool and are one tap from firing again.
- Run the misspellings. "Roseville" is picked over. "Rosevile" is not. The same goes for Haeger, Blenko, and every maker whose name a seller is typing from memory off a base mark.
- Check sold before you offer. Thirty seconds in the sold tab has saved us more money than any other habit in this business.
What Prowl is not
It is not an alert service, and it does not buy anything on your behalf. It builds searches — the same searches you would run by hand, run all at once — and shows live listings from ShopGoodwill, eBay, Etsy and Chairish on the page. To get those listings, the search term goes through our small server and nothing else does. Saved searches live in your own browser's local storage, which means they are private, and it also means they do not follow you to a different device unless you export a backup.
Why we gave it away
Because the alternative was worse for everyone. Owl & Twig is a small family studio in Michigan; we are not going to out-inventory the rest of the internet, and we would rather be the place collectors come to learn how to look. The guides on this blog exist for the same reason. A collector who can date a Viking owl or read a Rookwood base mark is a better customer than one who cannot, and considerably better company.
Prowl costs nothing, asks for nothing, and will keep working whether or not you ever buy a thing from us.
Every field guide on this site ends with a Prowl link that arrives with the search term already filled in. Start with one you are actually hunting.
Open ProwlWhere to go next
If you want the origin story rather than the manual, we wrote that separately in Prowl: I Got Tired of Opening Two Dozen Tabs, So I Built This. If you are comparing Prowl with SearchTempest, Gem or the alert apps, see How to search every vintage marketplace at once. For a sense of what a good search looks like in practice, the hen on nest and Viking glass guides both turn on details a seller almost never puts in a listing title — which is precisely the gap a wide search is for.
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