Pokemon card value FAQ
Fourteen questions people actually ask, answered without hedging.
What is my Pokemon card worth?
It depends on the exact print you own, its condition, and whether it is graded. Search the card name and its printed number here and you will get the current value for the grade you pick, along with the sold prices that value was worked out from. If you are not sure which print you have, read the guide on identifying a card before you trust any number.
Is the price a guarantee?
No. Every number on this site is an estimate computed from public market data, and it can be wrong. It is not an offer, not an appraisal, and not financial advice. Treat it as the best available read on where a card has been trading, then verify before you buy, sell or trade.
Where do the prices actually come from?
Sold-price history from PriceCharting is the backbone, and it is what every value, trend and projection is computed from. eBay active listings are shown separately as asking prices and are deliberately kept out of that analysis. Card identity comes from the Pokemon TCG API.
Why is the eBay number different from the value?
Because they measure different things. The eBay panel shows what sellers are currently asking, and asking prices routinely sit above what cards actually sell for. The value is computed from sales that already happened. Mixing the two would systematically overvalue a collection, so the app keeps them in separate panels.
Should I grade my card?
Grade when the spread between the raw value and the value at the grade you will realistically receive comfortably clears the total cost of grading, and when you are honest about the grade you will actually get. Centering is the usual reason a card that looks perfect comes back a 9. The grading guide walks through the arithmetic.
Which grading companies do you show?
PSA, CGC and BGS, with PSA as the primary grade. When you select a tier such as PSA 10, every graded source shows that same tier. PriceCharting's graded history is mostly PSA, so where CGC or BGS data is thin the PSA figure is shown as a proxy and is labeled as one.
Does it work for Japanese, Chinese and Korean promos?
Yes, through a separate path. The English card catalog does not contain them, so regional promos are found through a local index of regional listings and matched on the exact printed promo number. The match has to be exact, because a Japanese promo and its English counterpart can share a name and still be different cards at different prices.
Do you store my card photos?
No, never. A photo you scan is processed in memory and then dropped. It is never written to disk and never written to the database. The scan log has no column that could hold image bytes or text read from a photo, and the test suite fails the build if one is ever added.
Is there a free plan?
Yes. There are three plans. Free: card search and the current value, a collection of up to 25 cards, a watchlist of 3, and 3 photo scans a day. Plus: the same capabilities with room to grow, 25 scans a day, 500 cards and 25 watchlist entries. Pro: 200 scans a day, unlimited cards in your collection, unlimited watchlist entries, and every dealing tool: the buyer and seller deal modes, the trade evaluator and FlipFinder, Show Mode, the sales ledger with its tax export, CSV export of your own data, and Pokemon color themes. Current prices are shown on the Stripe checkout page, which is the authoritative source for them.
Do I need an account to look up a card?
No. Card search and price lookup are open to anyone. An account is needed only for the things that have to be saved to you: your collection, your watchlist and alerts, your sales ledger, and the photo scanner.
How often do prices update?
A lookup fetches current data at the moment you run it, so the number you see is as fresh as the source is. Beyond that, the app accumulates the sold comps it sees over time, so a card you check regularly builds a deeper history than any single fetch would return. There is no fixed nightly update you have to wait for.
How accurate is the 3-month projection?
Roughly 16 percent median error in a walk-forward backtest, with direction correct a bit under 60 percent of the time. That is useful as a lean, not as a promise. It is a separate number from the nowcast, which estimates the next sale price and lands within roughly 2 to 3 percent median error on liquid cards. The two accuracy figures are not interchangeable.
Can I export my collection and my sales?
On Pro, yes: the collection and watchlist export as CSV, and the sales ledger exports the year to a spreadsheet, which is what you want at tax time: what you paid, what you sold it for, and when. Where a cost basis is unknown it is reported as unknown rather than silently entered as zero, because a zero basis quietly overstates your gain. Nothing is locked away on the other plans: everything you entered stays visible inside the app, and you can ask for your account to be deleted at any time.
Can I price a sealed booster box or an elite trainer box?
No. The app is built for single cards, and the matching logic deliberately refuses to let a sealed product match a single card. That guard exists because a sealed box matched to a card produces a confidently wrong price, which is the worst possible failure for a pricing tool.
Still stuck?
The two long guides go deeper: what is my Pokemon card worth and should I grade my Pokemon card. For the method behind the numbers, read how it works.