Card Price

A phone-friendly web app for checking what a Pokémon card is worth in Australian dollars. Open the camera, fit the card in the box, and the app shows the card, the set, the number, the rarity, and market prices in AUD. If the scan is wrong, pick another match or search by name. Cards you add stay in a list on this phone, with a running total.

How scanning works

The photo stays on the server only long enough to read it. Nothing about the photo is stored.

1. The app looks for the card in the frame, then reads the writing with Tesseract (the tesseract program on the computer running the app).
2. It looks for the collector number at the bottom, such as 025/165. That number is the card number and the set's printed total.
3. It asks the Pokémon TCG API for cards with that name and number.
4. If several cards are still possible, it compares your photo with the official card picture and puts the closest one first.
5. You confirm the card, or pick a different one, before it is added to My cards.

Full-art cards with writing over the picture are harder to read. Search by name when a scan comes back empty.

Prices come from TCGplayer (US dollars, market price) and Cardmarket (euros, average selling price). They are converted with the Frankfurter rate for that day. Each price shows its source and date. If a price or a rate is missing, the app says no price. It does not fill in a guess.

Setup

You need Node.js 22+ and Tesseract.

# Debian or Ubuntu
sudo apt-get install tesseract-ocr

# macOS
brew install tesseract

npm install

An API key is optional. Without one, the Pokémon TCG API allows fewer requests. To use a key, create a .env.local file:

POKEMONTCG_API_KEY=your-key

Run

npm run dev

Open http://127.0.0.1:38471 on your computer. On an iPhone, the camera only works on https:// or on localhost. For a phone on the same Wi-Fi, deploy the app (see below) or use a tunnel that gives you an https address.

Add it to the home screen from Safari's Share menu. The installed app opens full screen and uses the rear camera.

Tests

npm test

The tests cover price conversion, missing prices, the collector-number reader, and a live check: they download the official picture of Pikachu from the 151 set (card sv3pt5-25) and a slightly rotated JPEG of that picture, then check that the top match is that card and that the prices are in AUD with a source and a date. That test needs the network and Tesseract.

Deploy

The scanner shells out to Tesseract, so the app needs a normal Node.js server, not a short serverless function.

docker build -t card-price .
docker run --rm -p 38471:38471 -e POKEMONTCG_API_KEY=your-key card-price

Put the container behind HTTPS. iPhone Safari will not open the camera on a plain http:// site. Prices are loaded when someone scans or opens My cards. They are not baked in at build time.