Help & FAQ

A portfolio tracker for collectors who treat comics and cards as an asset class. Add what you own and your cost basis; CollectVault tracks current Fair Market Value across every grade tier, your realized + unrealized P/L, and what's moving across the market. Your collection's daily worth on one balance sheet.

Yes, with a free tier (Collector Lite): track up to 50 comics or cards, manual entry from the catalog, wishlist + series completion, and 10 free AI scans per month. Paid tiers unlock the rest:

• Collector Pro ($9.99/mo) — unlimited collection, unlimited photo scanner, current Fair Market Value per copy, slab registry, pull lists, duplicates, CSV export.
• Investor Pro ($19.99/mo, 14-day trial) — adds the portfolio dashboard (cost basis, P/L, ROI), Top Movers, 30-day price history, price alerts, hourly Deal Hunt, arbitrage + grading-spread signals, exit planner, and AI insights.
• Vault Pro ($39.99/mo) — for dealers and six-figure portfolios: bulk import, sales analytics, Schedule-D tax reports, insurance appraisal PDFs.

See plans.

Fair Market Value is the median of recent sale comps for that exact variant + grader + grade. We pull live prices from PriceCharting on a daily refresh cron and aggregate user-logged sale comps in real time. Niche grades or low-liquidity items may have sparser data — logging your own purchases and sales improves the dataset for everyone.

Cards: RAW (the loose / ungraded market price) always, plus graded tiers (PSA 10, BGS 10,CGC 10) when PriceCharting carries them. Comics: RAW, CGC 9.6, CGC 9.8, and selectively higher tiers for hot keys. Grade tiers outside this coverage (PSA 8, CBCS, raw F/VF, etc.) show no automated price — you can still track the copy and log your own sale comp to value it.

Because they ARE different cards. PriceCharting catalogs every printing variation as its own product with its own market value — Unlimited, 1st Edition, Shadowless, 1st Edition Red Cheeks, promo cards, and so on. The art is identical but the print run and market price aren't — a Shadowless Charizard #4 is roughly 3-5x the price of the Unlimited print. Each row on the catalog printings page now shows a short blurb ("Shadowless: no drop-shadow on the right edge of the art frame, predates Unlimited") to help you identify which one you own.

Market-wide momentum. /hotcompares the latest valuation snapshot for every catalog item to the prior one and ranks the biggest gainers + losers. Like Robinhood's movers list — you don't need to own anything to see what's moving. Updates daily as the price refresh cron writes new snapshots.

Movement within YOUR collection over the trailing 30 days. Unlike the market-wide Hot Movers feed, this one is your personal portfolio — it surfaces the items you own whose FMV has moved the most. Needs at least 30 days of price history to compute; new collections see the empty state with a link to Hot Movers until snapshots accumulate.

Unrealized P/L = current Market Value − Cost Basis on the items you still OWN. Paper gains/losses; nothing has actually happened yet. Realized P/L= the actual cash result on copies you've SOLD (sale price − fees − cost). Mark a copy SOLD from its detail page to log the sale; the realized amount flows into your year-end tax report at /sold/report.

Comic prices come from PriceCharting's per-product API, which requires us to match each GCD comic to its PC product id one at a time. A background cron resolves a few hundred comics per day starting with the most-owned issues, so popular keys (Amazing Spider-Man #300, Hulk #181, Action Comics #1) get prices first and the long tail fills in over the next few weeks. When you ADD a comic, we trigger an immediate resolution attempt in the background — your portfolio usually shows a price within seconds of adding.

Yes. The Pull List tracks upcoming issues for series you follow so new comics + card sets land in your notifications when they ship. For already-published runs, each series detail page shows X/Y issues owned + a gap list with a one-click "Add all missing to wishlist" action.

Marketplace is off at launchand the menu hides it for non-admin users. We're shipping CollectVault as a portfolio tracker first, then adding peer-to-peer listings + offers in a follow-up release. Sign up and you'll get a notification when it opens.

Your session expires after a period of inactivity for security. On mobile Safari specifically, the browser sometimes drops the background session-touch when the screen locks or the app backgrounds — sign back in and you're good. If it's happening constantly during active use, email support@collectvault.net and we'll investigate.

Go to /scan, upload a photo of the cover. AI identifies the title, issue number, and variant; if there's a barcode it cross-checks against PriceCharting for a deterministic match. You confirm or correct, then we save the copy to your collection. Each confirmation also trains our private dataset so accuracy compounds over time.

Yes. Open the copy's detail page and use the Take photo or Add a coverbutton right under the cover slot. We pull covers automatically where we can, but some variants (virgin covers, retailer incentives, niche indies) aren't in any catalog — snap your own and it becomes the cover for that copy. Your photo only affects your copy, never the shared catalog.

Set a max price on anything in your wishlist and we scan eBay every hour. The instant a listing drops below your ceiling, you get an email with the link. Snooze any watch for 7/30/90 days when you don't want pings.

Step-by-step instructions for iPhone (Safari) and Android (Chrome / Edge / Samsung) live at /install. Once installed it opens like a native app — full screen, faster launch, native camera UI for the scanner. There's also a full native iOS app coming to the App Store; the home-screen install is the way to use the mobile experience now.

Yes — /copies/import takes a CSV/TSV. For sale comps you've already collected, /comps/import bulk-imports them and re-aggregates FMV. The importer fuzzy-matches series titles so "The Amazing Spider-Man" lines up with "Amazing Spider-Man".

CSV (collection): the Export button on /collection (Collector Pro). Full JSON (everything): Settings → Your data → Download all my data — free for every user (GDPR portability).

Settings → Danger zone → type your username to confirm. This permanently removes your account and every copy, comp, wishlist item, listing, offer, follow, and notification. Cancel any active Stripe subscription first via the Customer Portal.

Email support@collectvault.net or use the contact form. Bugs with reproduction steps + screenshots are gold; we read every one.

Yes by default. Your collection is visible only to you unless you toggle Public profile in Settings. Wishlists have their own toggle (Public want list). We never sell your data; see Privacy Policy.