Press
Cards AI press kit
Cards AI is a phone-camera scanner for trading cards that returns a real-time market value from live eBay sold comps and an AI condition grade in about eight seconds. It launched in 2025 from Jersey City, built solo by Matt Hastings, and competes with incumbents that rely on licensed price-guide data instead of the live market.
Quick facts
- Founder
- Matt Hastings (solo)
- Location
- Jersey City, NJ
- Launched
- 2025
- Platforms
- iOS, Android, Web
- Pricing
- $8.99/wk · $39.99/yr
- Stack
- Next.js, React Native, Supabase, Stripe
- Contact
- matt@cardsaiapp.com
Download
The story
Every price-guide app on the market today licenses its data from one of three providers — and every one of them lags the live market by weeks. A 2017 rookie that sold for $400 last Tuesday still shows up at $180 in the guide. That gap is fine if you collect; it is a problem if you trade. Cards AI skips the licensing tier entirely and reads sold comps directly from eBay, the same way a serious collector does — only it takes eight seconds instead of fifteen minutes.
The other half is grading. A PSA submission costs $25 minimum and takes weeks; a buyer in a Discord trade wants to know now whether the corner softness in your photo matters. Cards AI combines a vision model with a domain-tuned LLM to score centering, corners, edges, and surface from a phone shot. It is not a substitute for a slab — it is a substitute for guessing.
A solo developer can ship the live-data version because the economics that protect incumbents — six-figure licensing fees, sales teams, enterprise contracts — are exactly what slow them down. The product is built and supported by one person in Jersey City. That is a feature, not an apology.
Suggested angles
- Solo founder builds a card-pricing app that beats licensed-data incumbents by reading the same eBay sold comps a collector would search by hand.
- How real-time market data + computer vision replaces "book value" guides that haven't reflected the live market in twenty years.
- The post-COVID collectibles boom hasn't cooled — it consolidated. What an indie tool reveals about what collectors actually price-check.
- AI grading without the lab: how a phone camera + an LLM gets within a half-grade of a PSA pre-grade for under $0.05 per scan.
Assets
Need something not listed here? Email matt@cardsaiapp.com and you will get a reply the same day.