r/SideProject • u/Tasty-Ad-3753 • 1d ago
I built a card scanning app for Yu-Gi-Oh, Pokémon, and Magic and made it free and public
This is my first time launching a side project properly, but I wanted to do something for people for free - cards are updated weekly, and I'm looking to support more TCGs in the future.
Currently it's just a web app, I'm considering adding to the play store. If anyone has any advice on whether it's worth it / how difficult it is to get on it and get approved let me know.
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u/UniversalTrees49 18h ago
How reliable is it for choosing the correct printing and set? Seems like it’s going quite fast.
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u/Practical-Nonsense 1d ago
Wow, this is amazing. I feel like you could've charged 99 cents and made a bit lol
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u/darklordpotty 1d ago
I would donate a couple of bucks for this. Where are you pricing the cards and are you pulling top, median, or low prices (or allowing toggles for them)?
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u/Morthedubi 5h ago
dexly tcg does 3 price sources (price charting/tcgplayer/cardmarket) for each card and the scanner lets you scan a full binder page in under a second...
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u/TrueMeet2954 17h ago
Man! This is so cool...YOU MUST EXPAND THIS TO SPORTS CARDS!!
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u/Ok_Channel_3322 16h ago
Not that easy. At the end you need a sport card going through grading process. That's what adds value to the card.
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u/AltruisticCap12 16h ago
Tbh you just need a low false negative rate. Identify the possible valuable ones, then have info in app for determining real value
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u/xiaoxuanchuang 10h ago
iOS dev here who built a scanning app — Apple's on-device text recognition is genuinely the move. No server costs, works offline, no privacy headache. The hardest part wasn't recognition though, it was the capture flow. Glare on glossy cards will ruin you, and tilted photos tank accuracy more than anything. Also make rescanning one tap — that loop got way more use once it was instant.
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u/Zeusper 22h ago
if its open source where is the source code? and if its vibe coded ? feels sus not shareing the github
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u/Precarious3145 8h ago
Yea, anytime someone releases an app that makes me think "Alright but...why?" even when I'm part of the demographic, it's always vibecoded.
No actual developer would've spent the time to code this and keep it at a base level.
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u/tommyatr 6h ago
No actual developer would've spent the time to code this and keep it at a base level.
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u/Namiami91 18h ago
I tried it out, so far its mostly good. When scanning pokemon cards, the energy cards all say promo and say they're like $20+ when they're just regular basic cards so I have to go in and manually change them to the correct one.
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u/nomeaning1985 18h ago
What is the card price source? Can it also be configured or is Cardmarket to slow for this?
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u/BadBunnyBrigade 12h ago edited 9h ago
It also needs to be able to recognize the difference between two cards that have the same art, but might not have the same signature, print year, shade, etc. For example, I have land cards that differ from one another, such as Swamp. One might have a year printed on it and is a darker background frame color, while the other Swamp has no year printed and is a lighter color.
I need to be able to set these two apart in the collection.
Edit: I also have Swamp with different art, same artist and year, but it won't recognize the card. It just counts them as all one stack rather than separate ones. I'm pretty sure they may have different monetary values.
I think it grabs the name of the card and figures that all cards of that name and somewhat similar art are the same.
Edit 2: Also, whenever my phone's camera happens to capture my RGB keyboard by accident, it gives me a card called Chatterstorm.
Edit 3: Okay, now I've gotten to lands that have different art, different artist names but are counted as all one stack.
Edit 4: Now I've come to the portion of lands that are edition specific, but are still stacked together with all the other lands of the same name regardless if they have different art, artist names, printed years and edition symbols.
Edit 4.2: If I set the print, will that separate my lands by edition?
Edit 4.3: Confirmed, setting the individual printing of each land or variation will separate the stacks regardless of same name. However, if you don't already have these prints/editions memorized or written down, you'll have to Google for them. I don't think it'll divide the by art, though.
Edit 4.4: Nope, it doesn't separate them by art, unfortunately. If it won't do by art, can it do by the print number? For example, Island 337 and Island 338, same set but not same number.
Edit 5: You should include the symbol of every variety of edition OR have the app recognize the edition symbol on the card.
Edit 6: Confirmed, the different lands with different art/print number have different values and should not be stacked together. I just found the different print numbers, so nevermind all that.
Edit 7: Okay, they do divide by print number, but the art won't update to the specific card for that specific set and print number.
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u/TheFern3 5h ago
Bro on edit 999 jeez bro took the opportunity to send 1001 feature requests on a free project
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u/completelypositive 4h ago
It's helpful though. Can just feed it to ai to validate. User experience is helpful here I think
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u/whoknowsifimjoking 20h ago
It's only using the front camera for me and I see no way to change that
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u/kai_mercer19 19h ago
could you put the detected set and variant beside the price, with a quick correction button? would make the holo/language mismatches people mentioned easier to catch before saving a collection
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u/sleeve_gg 19h ago
That’s great, good job! I’ve built a collection tracker mostly for keeping an eye on the financial aspect of your collection - and I’ve included a card scanner but mine is nowhere as good as yours. Fair to say my target personas are folks who have already scanned their collections somewhere else, but yours is still impressive. How do you run the pipeline and what confidence score you accept before showing it as a match to the user?
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u/Concordia_Draco 18h ago
Does it have trouble with blue black hybrid cards and/or cards with alternate frames?
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u/saibayadon 16h ago
It's nice, but no set recognition is the biggest downside (at least in MTG). I assume you're matching the art crops from Scryfall in order to make it easier to "pick up" the cards instead of having to do a full card scan like ManaBox.
Cool nonetheless for scanning specific sets in one go.
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u/FitAppearance6492 16h ago
How does it handle old worn cards?
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u/BadBunnyBrigade 15h ago
Yes, I'd also like to know if it recognizes condition on older cards and takes that into consideration when grading/pricing, as well as recognizing edition.
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u/Jayanti_ 15h ago
This is so cool. I hope there's some kind of tracker for your p&l and then in the app there's a leaderboard for the ones with most profitability. That'd be crazy
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u/These-Pepper3212 15h ago
I tested it a bit. Its cool when you rip a pack open and want to quick check. But I have a collection with many old cards. It doesnt know whick version it is. You have to manually select the set and version. and some importand stuff is missing. from legends, you cant even select italian legends. only english. huge price difference.
It would be nice, if it would know what version it is. If I scan a card, a mini card appears on the bottom left. always the correct one. but it doesnt set it to this version. When you have special basic lands, its very unhandy to select the versions, sometimes I dont even know the name of the set myself...
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u/ApplebeeRuckus 14h ago
I built something extremely similar but it works with all TCG cards. I've handled the variation issues and grabbing printings, languages, and all that fun stuff. Good luck, your post did way better than mine about it.
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u/dutchpsychologist 14h ago
Really cool and handy. I am curious how well it performs in identifying the correct cards? Do you have metrics? Love the look and feel of the site and it works blazingly fast. Great job. I couldnt find something like a source button to see what the prices are based on? Or maybe i missed it.
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u/Local_Maize_966 13h ago
Wow, this looks absolutely incredible! Making a tool like this free and open-source is a huge win for the TCG community. The scanning speed in the video looks super smooth. Great work!
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u/bettertagsweretaken 12h ago
I'm so confused why this over something like Manabox? There's dozens of these already on the marketplace that are decent things. Manabox doesn't even need you to pay for anything.
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u/Ryutsaki 10h ago
It would be great if you could change the card price source to more options, here in Chile we mainly price singles to what Card Kingdom sells them for
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u/Intelligent-Ear1778 9h ago
theres such a huge surge on these scanners that fail to identify, why even bother if its double the work to correct its mistakes (also think about the errors you dont catch,lol)
manual excel sheet crew reporting in
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u/Southern-Homework958 8h ago
This is really cool. How does it handle cards in sleeves or with glare? That’s usually what kills scanner apps for me. Also curious where the price data comes from. Making it free and public is a generous call, nice work.
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u/WasabiSensitive6478 7h ago
Weekly card updates pulled from where, exactly? Thats the part that actually costs money and its the part you left out of the post.
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u/Money_Arachnid_8607 19h ago
You could’ve set a limit to how many scans you can do with the free version
And premium for unlimited
Jus sayin..
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u/ZorroGuardaPavos 23h ago
quite impress by accuracy and how fast it detects the cards, congrats great site!
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u/TheGoodestManInTown 1d ago
What does your vibecoded app do better than any of the already existing TCG card scanning apps?
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u/SubstantialDataUse 23h ago
Well the speed and accuracy is one thing. Uploading a card 1 by 1 to collectr is a nightmare
Uploading a card 1 by 1 to 80% of App Store card scanners is a nightmare
Give credit to OP vibe code or not for stepping in the right direction of speed and accuracy
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u/jaerie 23h ago
Did you see the video? If it actually works like that it leaves any existing app in the dust
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u/TheShadowX 14h ago
it obviously wont because actual programmers of existing scanners understood that recognizing the correct set the card came from and handling multiple languages is important
this is a useless app for now
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u/Illustrious_Dog_1470 13h ago edited 8h ago
Hi, I also made a scanner (Pokemon, One Piece, Lorcana)
I've been stuck in iOS app store review since early August, with an average 2 week turn around time. ASC has been quite vague with rejection reasons; I have since completely scrubbed my website and app of all potential pokemon, OP, and Lorcana IP, while trying to keep the content looking differentiated and enticing. I'm not really sure how competitor apps all mention these things in their metadata and made it onto the store. Maybe they let it slide after you start earning enough revenue for the App Store.
And as others have said, I think we've solved correctly identifying cards with no reprints and only one finish <100ms. It's a challenge of it's own to separate charizard 25th celebrations versus base set, for example, and to do it across all cards effectively.
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u/twomasc 12h ago
as somebody who works in app management for years... Apple can be a real pain. Sometimes you just have to start over.
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u/Illustrious_Dog_1470 12h ago
Honestly, maybe. I could buy a new domain name, rebrand, etc. I picked the name 6 years ago and there's several similarly named apps so that could be a silent blocker they aren't responding about. Thanks for your feedback
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u/Comprehensive_Web279 21h ago
Love this, and I’ll probably get downvoted for saying it, but I think making it free is a mistake. Card collectors spend serious money on this hobby. A couple bucks a month for something that saves them from typing in set numbers by hand is an easy sell, and it’s what keeps the app alive when the server bill shows up next year.
Is an iOS version planned? Apple’s on-device text recognition is great for this kind of thing, and most people scan cards on their phone anyway.
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u/Ok_Channel_3322 16h ago
I don't understand the downvote. All apps and stuff require some maintenance and then get overloaded and crash and then people put the blame on the developer....
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u/SirTJ1997 23h ago edited 11h ago
Man wish there was something like this for magic. Great job!
Edit: ain't no way lmao. Only read YuGiOh, saw the cards but they were upside down didn't register it was magic 💀
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u/Independent-Ad6340 22h ago
When you finish the pack it could show a pop-out saying "congrats! you just lost x.xx money!" :)