Rick, you are right. I however failed to realize in the effort to get the lowest price possible that I was really only talking about a couple of dollars. I failed to calculate risk, I had more to lose by not using the BIN than I had to gain by the snipe. Lesson in math learned.
For the snipe lesson of the day here is the reply to my support question:
I am sincerely sorry to see that your snipe on item # 320207955477 was unable to be placed by Auction Sniper. While there were no widespread system problems at this time, this appears to be a case of our system being unable to place your bid on time.
We snipe from an atomic clock, which calibrates our servers. We snipe every auction not once but from 3 different servers and locations. 2 of them snipe exactly on time and 1 server tries to adjust for eBay server lag according to how long their average server is taking. In this situation, unfortunately, our system underestimated the lag time of the eBay server that accepted your bid and, as a result, the auction ended before the bid could be accepted.
I they have offered a snipe credit for later use. I just wanted to understand what had happened. You do get a false since of security that if you snipe something you will get it, little reminders like this are always to be remembered.