looking for nice budget auctions cause a lot of the ones i see on biddr are expensive, esp the us based ones. i know of savoca, but they arent us based so shipping is a bit expensive
Unfortunately there is no such thing as a budget coin auction in the post 2020 world. US based dealers sometimes have online pick bins. Marc Breitsprecher maintains an online pick bin that will have some interesting stuff sometimes. https://mrbcoins.com/cgi-bin/category.pl?id=121
Unfortunately internet adds cost. Best pick bins are at shows where the dealer puts zero cost in it. I simply love getting my hands dirty searching these. I miss large shows......
Breitsprecher pick bin is a good suggestion. You might also try bargainbinancients.com - I think they offer a discount to cointalk members. You could also look for vcoins dealers who also sell on eBay. I can think of a couple of dealers who sometimes auction off less expensive coins that way. While it's eBay you wouldn't be buying from an unknown seller. I also think the Savoca shipping isn't so bad if you're getting several coins in the auction. If you're only getting one or two I agree it's painful.
Occasionally, I've run into coins listed on Biddr, Sixbid and Numisbids which, if you go to the dealer's website, are also listed at a slightly lower price. To @OutsiderSubtype's point, it's like dealers who list both on Vcoins and ebay. ebay is like Twitter --the content is all over the map, but lots of established dealers use it.
Group lots may be the way to go, but good ones seem to be getting harder to find and more expensive as well.
Technically, as I see it, the Breitsprecher pick bin is not a pick bin but just a list of coins grouped together by the fact that the price paid is 10% coin value and 90% service charge. The genuine, show grade pick bin is a bowl/bag/box of coins from which you can select whatever you want for a set price. I have seen them within the last few years as low as $2 but recall some great Jonathan Kern bags with unidentified silver separated in $200 and $500 groups. These carried no ID whatsoever. If you could not tell which coins were owl tetradrachms and which were Tribute Pennies, that was your problem. One of my favorites from 'the day' was Morris of Windsor coins who offered me a wet wipe to clean my hands when I finished with his box of bronzes. That was the kind of customer service that made the show experience great. A great advantage of that business model was that people like me would pay a higher price for a harder to sell coin because it was something I was looking for even though no one else cared in the least. c.1990, that was the situation with Eastern Septimius Severus. You could see the question on their faces, "Why would anyone want that?" I have done my part along (with several others) to make Eastern Severan into the numismatic equivalent of chicken wings. Once they came free with a brest but now people pay extra for them. Those of a certain age might remember when poor people could be given wings, necks and giblets at butcher shops along, on a good day, with flank steak before it became 'London Broil'. The Internet certainly has changed everything.
Another potential place to procure coins is facebook's Ancient and Medieval Coins Sales group. Usually the prices are fairly reasonable for what is being offered up for sale. You could also join the facebook Ancient and Medieval Coins group, where folks often show coins they have just purchased. I am a member of both groups as some other CT'rs are as well.
To this day chicken wings in Russia are called "bush wings". Chicken wings were so cheap as late as the early 1990's that the US shipped hundreds of thousands of pounds of them to Russia as food relief after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
