Today's tools are independent but shallow, incomplete, or too slow to trust. Card Prices makes cross-platform pricing comprehensive, accurate, and fast — free, and backed by independent research, for the $50B+ trading card market.
FounderEric Schnelker · Purdue (pursuing M.S. Software Engineering)
01 · The Mission
Everyone deserves an honest price.
A collectible is only worth what the market will pay — but only if you can see the market. Today, the few companies that grade the cards, run the marketplaces, and publish the "official" prices are the same companies. Card Prices exists to give collectors, vendors, and researchers one thing the incumbents structurally cannot: an independent reference price.
Independent by design
No marketplace. No grading arm. No transaction fees. Nothing to steer you toward.
Free at the core
Cross-platform price comparison is free, with no account and no ads — and always will be.
Accountable to data
Methodology documented and reproducible, not hidden behind a black-box "Market Price."
Thesis source: card-prices.com/about — "When grading, marketplace, and pricing data are all controlled by interconnected entities, independent tools become essential."
CARD PRICES
02 · The Problem
Getting a price is easy. Pricing the right card is hard.
A parent can't tell these apart — and neither can a scanner that only reads the artwork. The same 1999 Charizard ships in 31+ printings we track; the right ID moves the price by orders of magnitude.
1st Edition
Shadowless
Unlimited
SPOT THE DIFFERENCE
Same name. Same art. Same language. The only physical tells: a 1-mm black “EDITION 1” stamp and a drop shadow on the art frame.
1ST ED
SHADOWLESS
UNLIMITED
● 1st Edition stamp
●
—
—
● Art-frame shadow
—
—
●
Typical raw · NM
$10–100K+
$1–10K+
$500+
Artwork-keyed scanners can't separate these — the pixels match. Ours votes a 10+ model ensemble, then verifies against catalog data.
…plus 28 more of the same art across 9 languages — No-Rarity Japanese, Black-Dot errors, five European 1st editions, and more. HOVER ANY CARD TO INSPECT
Collectors Holdings (PSA + SGC + Beckett) controls ~80% of grading volume — 2.2× past the “highly concentrated” line.
Consolidation & HHI analysis: Card Prices IEEE research draft, §§ II–III (2026). Underlying events: eBay–TCGplayer $295M (eBay IR, 2022) · Goldin→eBay & SGC/Beckett→Collectors (eBay IR & Collectors PRs, 2024–25) · GameStop $56B bid for eBay, rejected (GameStop SEC 8-K, May 2026) · Rasmussen v. Collectors Holdings, No. 8:26-cv-00897 (C.D. Cal., 2026) · Rep. Pat Ryan FTC request (Dec 2025). Grading: 26.6M cards graded 2025, PSA 71.8% / CGC 18.4% (cllct.com).
CARD PRICES
04 · The Solution
Price the right card — properly, and independently.
Card Prices is the neutral layer that prices a card correctly: the exact variant, in the exact condition, against real recent sales and the lowest live listing — owning no marketplace and no grading business, so it has nothing to steer you toward.
ANY CARD, ANY FORM“Charizard 4/102”name · set · number · photo · 15 languages (Pokémon)
RESOLVED TO ONE IDENTITYEXACT VARIANT + CONDITIONprint · foiling · edition · language · grade
REAL SALES540-day realized priceswhat it actually trades for
LOWEST LIVE LISTINGsame variant · same conditionthe real buy-it-now path
No marketplace. No grading arm. No transaction or basic-use fees. The price has nothing to sell you.
Live today at card-prices.com. Sources: live product; card-prices.com/about.
CARD PRICES
05 · The Product
Already live — and deeper than it looks.
card-prices.com · Current Status: 200
Live — a real Charizard result on card-prices.com: exact variant & condition, TCGplayer low & market
Deep search. Name, set, or number → lowest listing, market & recent sold for the exact variant + condition, with a live stats ribbon.
Exact-match filters. Condition, foiling, print, and language — narrow to the precise card, live.
Vendor pricing tools. Shops and dealers price and tag inventory at scale off the same independent reference data — bulk set dividers and condition-priced labels straight to a thermal printer.
Mobile apps (beta). iOS and Android in testing on TestFlight and Google Play — the delivery vehicle for the scanner.
Card scanner (in dev). A 10+-model vision ensemble — with an automated card feeder as a possible much-later exploration, not a commitment.
Sources: live product (search, collections, blog); TestFlight & Google Play internal-testing builds. Collections, mobile apps & scanner explicitly labeled in testing / active development.
CARD PRICES
06 · The Opportunity
A $50B+ market, growing and globally fragmented.
MARKET DATA · BOARD2024 → 2033
TRADING CARDS · TOTAL$50B+→ $90B BY 2032
COLLECTIBLE SINGLES$9.5B→ $15.7B BY 2033 · +65%
GRADING SERVICES$202M→ $637M BY 2033 · 3.2×
JAPAN SINGLES · FY24$1.99B2× YOY · KOREA ~$630M · CHINA +56.6%/YR
WHATNOT LIVE COMMERCE$8B+GMV · INVISIBLE TO TODAY'S PRICING TOOLS
CARDS GRADED · 202526.6MTCG PASSES SPORTS · NO NEUTRAL REFERENCE
Six growing markets, one shared gap: no independent, cross-platform price reference exists anywhere. That gap is the product.
Sources: Intel Market Research — Trading Cards Market Outlook 2026–2032 ($52.1B 2025 → $90.2B 2032); internal market-research summary. SAM/SOM are illustrative.
CARD PRICES
07 · Competition
Everyone else has a conflict, a paywall, or one source.
Tool
Independent
Cross-platform
Free core
No conflict
Per-condition
Graded
★ Card Prices
YES
YES
YES
YES
YES
All graders
TCGplayer (eBay-owned)
No
Own only
Browse
8–15% fees
Yes
Partial
eBay (Terapeak)
No
Own only
Browse
Owns market
Partial
Partial
Card Ladder / PSA (graded-only)
No
Partial
$15–20/mo
Grades it
No
Graded
PriceCharting
Yes
eBay-only
Yes
Yes
Single #
Partial
Collectr
Yes
Partial
Freemium
Yes
Partial
Partial
Cardmarket (EU)
Yes
Own only
Browse
Fees
Yes
No
Other tools offer quick access to some of this — but gaps in comprehensiveness, accuracy, or ease of use leave the average person trusting bad data as their source of truth, pricing the wrong variant (extremely common), or anchoring to non-standard numbers.
And the few that are per-variant/condition accurate guard it on purpose — clunky paywalled interfaces, blocked API access, and anti-scraping walls keep that data hard to reach and impossible to build on.
Card Prices is the only tool that is independent and cross-platform and free and per-variant/condition accurate — and openly accessible.
Sources: IEEE draft § II.D; internal market-research summary; competitor product review. “Partial” = capability exists but limited in coverage, depth, or access (one marketplace, graded-only, or higher-tier).
CARD PRICES
08 · The Moat
Three layers that compound — and one rivals structurally can't copy.
01 · CAPTURE
Listing lifecycle tracking
Every live listing is fingerprinted and followed through its lifecycle — active, relisted, or gone — alongside cross-platform public pricing.
02 · VERIFY
Sales and live listings
Disappeared listings are vetted for a legitimate sale — a true sold record — while the lowest live listing stays first-class data beside it.
03 · RESOLVE
One canonical identity
Pokémon cards & variants across all 15 release languages reconciled to a single identity — the connective tissue rivals lack.
04 · IDENTIFY
10+ model ML ensemble
Vision ensemble on NVIDIA NIM — automated card ID by majority vote; the engine behind the scanner.
05 · PRICE
The reference price
Recent sales + lowest listing per exact variant & condition — independent by design.
Recurring infrastructure: near-zero — free-tier hosting + Cloudflare Workers + a single $300 refurbished server (API, custom caching, normalization), plus a modest developer-tooling subscription. Lean today, compute-bound as we scale.
And the deepest moat: an independent, documented research methodology. Card Ladder cannot publish a paper critiquing market consolidation — it is owned by the consolidator. Independent credibility is a durable, un-copyable brand asset.
Sources: internal data-pipeline & infrastructure documentation; IEEE draft (infra & cost). All figures are real, documented internal data.
card variants priced across 55 games — incl. 166,283 Pokémon across all 15 release languages
7.78M
market & low price points tracked
541,412
unique cards priced across 55 games
≈$0/mo
infrastructure today — MVP-lean by design; scaling adds compute, not overhead
Across all cards, their variants, their conditions, and their languages, pricing data is being sourced for over 7 million distinct products.
Product
Live at card-prices.com — cross-platform comparison, graded pricing across every grading company, collections beta, label printing; iOS & Android apps in beta testing.
Partnership outreach
45 emails to platforms across 12 countries — Heritage Auctions granted data access; 42 conversations open.
Research
Research-grade methodology, documented in a working draft — independently developed, with academic-advisor outreach underway.
Pre-launch on audience. card-prices.com hasn't been advertised yet — the figures above are the data engine, not the audience. Growth is the next phase — usage analytics (PostHog + Search Console) instrumenting now to measure the first cohort. See the model and go-to-market that follow.
Sources: internal dataset; outreach tracker. Audience is pre-launch; Year-1 growth targets are illustrative (next slide).
CARD PRICES
10 · Sustaining the Mission
Free core is the engine — premium tools keep it alive.
more binder slotsmore master sets at oncecard scannermass pricing labelsportfolio analytics
PLUS affiliate referrals (eBay · TCGplayer) · developer API (exploratory) · grants & sponsorship
The scanner is the primary revenue engine — usage-based: pay only for what you scan.
Scanner-led, usage-based monetization. A 10+-model vision ensemble that IDs the exact variant and prices it live — the flagship paid product. Vendors scan binders at scale and pay only for what they use; no subscription lock-in.
Everything else stays free & mission-aligned. Search, compare, and collections stay $0 forever; affiliate referrals, modest premium add-ons, and grants cover the scaling compute costs as we grow — nothing here compromises independence.
Eric Schnelker built the entire stack solo — distributed data collection, ML inference, frontend UX, and the research — and runs it in production at near-zero recurring cost.
Pursuing an M.S. in Software Engineering — Purdue University (Elmore Family School of ECE & Dept. of Computer Science).
B.S. Computer Science, B.S. Cybersecurity, and B.S. Mathematics — a triple degree: three separate B.S. degrees, University of Tulsa; minors in Data Science and Music.
Computer scientist (2 years), soon stepping up to Operations Research Analyst — a promotion into applied analytics and systems-engineering rigor.
Ground-truth market fluency — first-hand familiarity with how cards are identified, graded, and priced.
ResearchIEEE methodology · card-research.com
ProductSearch · collections w/ auth+MFA · alerts · label printing · iOS + Android apps in beta — designed, built & shipped solo
ML / CV10+-model vision ensemble on NVIDIA NIM · majority-vote ID · exploratory feeder concept (far future)
Every card is a long-tail query ("Machop Evolutions price"). Per-card and per-set pages = thousands of indexable, compounding entry points — the primary $0-CAC wedge.
Community-led
Seed r/PokemonTCG, collector Discords, and Facebook groups by answering pricing questions with the tool — card collecting is one of the most community-driven hobbies online.
Independent watchdog
The consolidation story is earned-media gold — David-vs-Goliath PR that collectors and journalists share for free, with Card Prices as the independent voice in it.
The scanner is the artifact
"Watch someone scan a 500-card binder" is inherently shareable — the demo that sells itself.
NORTH STARindexed card pages→organic sessions→returning users
A free, principled, genuinely useful tool against conflicted incumbents is remarkable enough to be talked about for free.
MITIGATIONInfrastructure documented & automated · lean by design (≈$0/mo to run) · active contributor + advisor pipeline (card-prices.com/join).
Monetization
Free-core models can stall before they sustain.
MITIGATIONThree independent levers — affiliate referrals, premium tools, grants — no single conversion assumption carries the model; the free core stays free.
A funded competitor
A well-capitalized rival could copy the product surface.
MITIGATIONIncumbents are structurally conflicted — neutral cross-platform pricing cannibalizes their take rate. Our edge compounds: ease of use, accuracy, and a UI built for collectors — plus coverage rivals don't attempt (13 release languages, Topps, Bandai, Old Maid Pokémon).
Raising $250k–$1M pre-seed — the first outside capital.
Nothing raised to date. The company runs at near-zero cost, so this raise buys speed, not survival — capital goes to compute, coverage, and the first hires, on the same disciplined part-time cadence that shipped everything in this deck.
Self-hosted inference
Move the vision ensemble from rented APIs to owned GPU serving — per-scan cost $0.33 → $0.03, ~95% gross margin on the paid scanner.
Multi-game, multi-language
Extend the canonical-identity data layer beyond Pokémon — Magic, Yu-Gi-Oh, sports — on infrastructure already built for it.
Partnership conversion
Turn 40+ open platform conversations — Heritage Auctions data access granted, PriceCharting collection authorized — into recurring data-licensing revenue.
Unit economics: internal cost data (AWS CloudWatch / Cost Explorer, Aug 2026); outreach tracker. 18–24 months to seed-ready milestones: MRR live, licensing signed, growth instrumented.
CARD PRICES
15 · How to Help
What accelerates the mission now: partners, data, compute, and people.
Data partnerships
Access agreements with platforms & marketplaces to widen and legitimize coverage.
Grants, accelerators & credits
Non-dilutive funding and cloud/compute credits to keep the core free as it scales beyond free tier.
Research backing
Academic & institutional support for the independent research that anchors our credibility.
Contributors & advisors
Volunteer builders & advisors — data engineering, ML, frontend, market expertise, CAD, QA — to extend a one-founder stack. card-prices.com/join
The infrastructure is built and the unit cost is near-zero. What accelerates the mission now is distribution, legitimacy, and data access — exactly what the right partners and supporters provide.
Available programs: AWS Activate, Microsoft for Startups, NVIDIA Inception, GCP for Startups (up to $100K–$200K credits with accelerator backing).
STAGE 3 · Evolves from price guidesPut Card Prices on the $50B+ market
Card Prices ∞ HP
The trading card market needs its Bloomberg terminal — except free.
Ability · Independent Reference
Compare every market for the exact variant and condition. This power can't be used if you own a marketplace, a grading arm, or charge transaction fees.
weakness none foundresistance conflicts of interest −30retreat cost never
A $50B+ market, newly consolidated into conflict — and one independent, research-backed, already-live tool making card pricing comprehensive, accurate, and free.
