Our story
Built by collectors
tired of guessing
Radar started with a shoebox. A few hundred cards pulled out of storage, one long evening of tab-switching between price guides, auction archives and sold listings — and a realization: in a hobby this big, the simple question "what is this card worth right now?" still didn't have a simple answer.
The problem we couldn't unsee
Every collector knows the ritual. You hold a card, you type its year, set, player and number into a search bar, you scroll past asking prices nobody ever pays, you squint at blurry slab photos, and ten minutes later you have a guess. Multiply that by a binder, and pricing a collection becomes a weekend project.
The data to answer the question properly already existed — public sold listings, auction records, grading population reports. It was just scattered, unstructured, and slow to read. Nobody had connected it to the fastest sensor every collector already owns: the phone camera.
What we built
Radar is a recognition engine wrapped in a camera. Point it at a card — raw or slabbed — and it identifies the player, set, year and parallel, then pulls what that exact card has actually been selling for on eBay: the low, the median, the high. No asking prices. No decade-old book values.
Computer vision
The camera reads the card the way a sharp-eyed dealer would: design, borders, foil pattern, print details — down to the parallel.
Sold-comps engine
The identified card is matched against real eBay sold listings and pricing data — transactions that actually cleared, refreshed continuously.
AI condition read
Centering, corners, edges and surface get a PSA-style estimate, so you know whether professional grading is worth the fee before paying it.
How we got here
The question that started it
A revisited childhood collection, an evening of manual price lookups, and the decision to stop guessing — and start building.
Teaching a camera to read cardboard
Months of training runs on card designs, parallels and slab labels. The hard part was never "is this a baseball card" — it was telling a base card from its refractor at an angle, in bad lighting.
Radar ships on iOS and Android
Scan, value, grade estimate, collections and portfolio tracking — free to try, built to answer the shoebox question in seconds.
The editorial arm
We started publishing what we see in the sold-comps data as scouting reports — value guides and grading explainers written the way we wanted them written: honest numbers, no hype.
What we believe
"A card is worth what it sold for — not what somebody is asking."
Radar founding team"If the honest answer is 'your card is worth a dollar', the app should say so."
Radar founding team"An estimate is a decision tool, not an appraisal. We say that out loud."
Radar founding teamWhere we're going
The roadmap is the same question at bigger scale: deeper price history, smarter grading estimates, better tools for treating a collection like the portfolio it is. The hobby deserves market infrastructure as good as its cards.
If you collect, the fastest way to see what we mean is to scan something. The app is free to try, and your first scan takes under a minute.
Questions, ideas, partnerships — talk to the team. Curious what we publish? Start with the scouting reports.