What we've shipped.
Card Bullpen is being built in the open, and this is the honest record of it — shipped work only, in plain language, written for what it means to a collector. No roadmap, no “coming soon,” no invented numbers. If it's here, it's working.
In active development · Launching 2026Every roster move, newest first.
One source of truth, updated as the bench fills out. Each entry is a real, shipped change — translated from the engine room into what it does for your collection.
-
The Story So Far
I've collected sports cards for thirty-plus years — since I was a kid in the 1980s. Baseball and hockey mostly — the sports I know in my bones — though the collection has crept into football, basketball, and soccer too, plus a shelf of sealed wax I keep telling myself I won't open.
For most of that time, the hardest part wasn't buying or selling. It was deciding. Is this prospect worth chasing before he gets called up? Is this card worth the grading fee, or does it come back a 9 and lose me money? What's my floor when someone makes an offer at a show and I've got thirty seconds to answer? Every one of those questions meant opening five tabs — a price guide, a checklist site, a pop report, sold comps, and a spreadsheet of everything I owned — and trying to hold it all in my head.
The hobby has a hundred places to buy and sell. What it doesn't have is a front office — the part of a team that scouts the talent, values it, and makes the call. So I started building one. For myself, at first.
It began as a way to stop losing track of what I owned. Then it learned to identify a card from a photo and value it against real, recent sales. Then it started watching for the prospects I cared about before the market noticed them. Then it learned to do the grading math, to set a floor for a show, to flag a drop the morning it went live instead of the week after. One piece at a time, a spreadsheet replacement turned into something that actually thinks alongside me.
At some point it stopped being a personal tool and started being a product. The thing I'd wanted to exist for years didn't — so I'm building it for every collector who's ever juggled those same five tabs. It's called Card Bullpen: the front office for your card collection.
It isn't finished. It's in active development, launching in 2026, and I'm building it in the open — which is what this log is for. Every meaningful thing that ships will show up here, in plain language, as it lands. No roadmap promises, no vaporware — just what's actually built, when it's built.
If that's the kind of tool you've wished for too, the waitlist is one email: cardbullpen.com. I read every reply.
— Mark
-
Thousands more cards added to the lookup database
- Loaded thousands of real cards into the lookup database, including Topps and Bowman flagship (2023-2025 Series 1, 2 and Update), Bowman Chrome Prospects, Upper Deck hockey (base, Young Guns and Canvas) and UEFA soccer Chrome sets.
- Improved player and card-number matching so spellings with accents, hyphens or spacing differences (like UD Canvas alpha codes) still find the right card.
- Sharpened identity matching so cards are sorted to the correct year, player and product instead of getting confused with look-alikes.
-
Your collection now lives with your account
- Moved your collection onto a per-account database so it travels with you instead of living on one device.
- Migrated existing collections over with verified, non-lossy checks so nothing was dropped in the move.
-
More accurate values from real recent sales
- Switched valuations to use true final sold prices and to separate cards that actually sold from listings that ended unsold.
- Started capturing ended-auction results into a shared price history so estimates get steadier over time.
-
Dark, light, and System themes
- Added a choice of Dark, Light, or System (follow-your-phone) appearance.
- Refreshed the typography with the Anton and Oswald display fonts for a cleaner, more readable lockup.
-
A home for your alerts, plus tap-to-read hobby news
- Added an in-app Alerts tab that collects your deal, bid-queue and news notifications in one place, with an unread count and the ability to mark read or clear them.
- Turned on hobby news and insider alerts, and made each one tap straight through to the full article or the relevant card.
- Hardened notifications so taps always land safely inside the app or on a trusted eBay listing.
-
Smarter deal discovery, now live
- Turned on automated deal discovery that scouts listings each morning and surfaces buys matched to the players and cards you care about.
- Cut duplicate and junk listings (mystery boxes, repacks, Topps NOW / Panini Instant noise) so the deals you see are cleaner.
- Added per-seller and per-name limits plus balanced coverage across categories so one seller or one name can't flood the feed.
-
Connect your eBay account
- Added a secure eBay sign-in so your watchlist restores automatically instead of being hand-loaded.
- Pulled in 152 missing eBay purchases as cost-basis entries so your collection reflects what you actually bought.
- Added a connection-status badge that tells you, plainly, when your eBay link is healthy or needs reconnecting.
-
See what a card is asking for right now
- Added a Current eBay listings panel that shows the going asking range beside your recent-sold comp.
- Filtered out troll prices and outliers so the range reflects realistic asks, not noise.
-
A clearer, more dependable Bid Queue
- Reworked each bid-queue card so the walk-away price leads, the ceiling is clearly labeled, and the listing link and thumbnail just work.
- Split out ended auctions and made bids and countdowns honest, never showing a synthetic bid as if it were live.
- Moved the queue onto durable storage so large watchlists sync reliably without dropping items.
-
Add a card by taking a photo
- Added photo scan: snap a card and it identifies the player, year, set and parallel, then drops it into your collection.
- Built in confidence checks so a guessed field is left blank rather than filled in wrong, and flags possible duplicates before you add.
- Added a delete-a-card flow so you can cleanly remove an entry and everything tied to it.
-
Scan a graded slab's cert label
- Added cert-label scanning that reads a graded slab, detects the grader and cert number, and matches it against your collection.
- Anchored results to cards you actually own so it confirms what you have instead of inventing a match.
-
Tools for working a card show
- Added show-floor pricing with a clear walk-away FLOOR as the hero price and an ASK beside it for negotiating at the table.
- Added a Candidates view to pick what to bring, with filtering, scoring and CSV export, plus a day-of tracker for what's in, sold or back home.
- Added a Scan / Look up entry point right inside the Show tab for pricing a card mid-conversation.
-
Automatic watchlist suggestions
- Added nominations that suggest players and cards worth watching based on hobby chatter, which you can accept or dismiss in one tap.
- Added an in-app badge so you know when new suggestions are waiting.
-
Real recent-sold comps you can trust
- Rebuilt card valuation to pull real recent eBay sold comps, with the dates, prices and titles read straight from each listing rather than guessed.
- Added fail-loud guards so when a comp can't be fetched it says so honestly instead of making up a number.
-
Introducing the Bid Queue
- Launched the Bid Queue: import your eBay watchlist and see walk-away and ceiling prices on the auctions you're tracking.
- Added ending-soon and deal alerts so you get a heads-up before a watched auction closes.
- Improved card-lookup accuracy with a much larger name dictionary, lifting clean parses from the mid-40s into the 70s percent.
-
Card lookup and hobby news arrive
- Shipped the core card lookup: paste or type a card and get a structured read of player, year, brand, set, parallel and grade.
- Added a hobby news and insider feed that aggregates from Reddit and RSS sources.
- Added a Watchlist of terms to follow, with push notifications wired up for high-signal hits.
-
The app goes online
- Stood up the installable phone app (PWA) with secure sign-in so your data is tied to your account.
- Moved your Sell Plan off a single device and into account-backed sync, with a last-synced indicator.
- Laid the push-notification groundwork so the app can reach you with timely alerts.
Get the next move in your inbox.
Card Bullpen launches in 2026. Watch the log fill out here; when you'd rather hear the moment doors open, leave your email and we'll tell you the day it's ready. No spam, no noise.
- A launch-day email the moment doors open in 2026.
- Pricing news before anyone is asked to pay.
- One list, launch news only — unsubscribe anytime.