About Owlex

Owlex is an independent product, built and run in the UK. It isn’t backed by a marketplace, a card retailer or a grading company, which matters more than it sounds: nobody profits from a valuation coming out high, because Owlex never takes a share of a sale.

The recognition model, the pricing pipeline and the app are built by the same person, so the claims on this site are made by someone who can be held to them. Questions, corrections and complaints all go to the same place: support@owlex.co.uk.

Owlex matches the artwork itself rather than reading the text on the card. That is the important design decision: text recognition falls over on Japanese prints, foils and glare, which is exactly the set of cards people most want valued.

The model is trained on around 10,000 hand-labelled cards. On a single-card scan it names the exact print correctly on the first try 91% of the time, and the right print is among its top five suggestions up to 99.1% of the time. Those five are one button away, so on the rare miss you pick the right card in a second rather than re-shooting it.

It identifies the exact print — set, collector number, language and variant — not just the card name. That distinction is the whole game, because two copies of “the same” card can differ in value by an order of magnitude.

Card detection runs on your device. A whole binder page is detected in one shot, so photographing a page of nine takes about as long as photographing one card.

Pricing comes from JustTCG, a dedicated trading-card pricing API that blends live sales data across multiple online marketplaces. Owlex is not affiliated with or endorsed by JustTCG, eBay, or any card publisher.

Values are matched to the exact print and condition you scanned, not to the card name. They are cached so the app stays fast, and subscribers on any paid plan get every card in their stock refreshed within 24 hours.

Market values are quoted in US dollars, because that is the currency our pricing source reports — it returns no currency field at all, and inventing a conversion would be pretending to a precision we don’t have. If you sell in another currency, treat the market value as a reference point and set your own asking price.

Scanning and pricing cards one at a time is free, on every tier, permanently. That is the core of the app, and putting it behind a paywall would make it useless to the people it is for. There is no daily limit and no scan credit to run out of.

Paid tiers gate capacity and convenience rather than the core loop: how many cards you can hold in your stock, cloud photo backup, the 24-hour price refresh, removing ads, and listing to eBay. Ads appear on the free tier only.

The one thing the free tier meters is multi-card scanning — photographing a whole binder page at once. Free includes ten of those so you can see whether it works for your collection; after that, scanning carries on one card at a time, or a paid plan makes it unlimited. We would rather be plain about that than let you find it out mid-binder.

Owlex is not a marketplace. When you sell, the listing goes to your own eBay account and the sale is between you and your buyer. Owlex never handles the payment and takes 0% of the sale. Full detail is on the pricing section.

Being straight about the gaps is part of being trustworthy about the numbers. As of August 2026:

• No condition grading. Owlex does not assess centering, edges or surface, and does not predict a PSA/BGS/CGC grade. You choose the condition yourself. An AI grader is something we want to build; it does not exist today.
• No sports cards. The scanner can handle them, but there is no pricing source we trust enough to publish a number from — so we would rather not support them than show you a value we can’t stand behind.
• Five games. Pokémon, Magic: The Gathering, Yu-Gi-Oh!, One Piece and Lorcana. More depend on catalogue coverage and a pricing source we trust, in that order.
• iPhone only for now. Android is coming. There is no web app — scanning, pricing and listing all live in the phone app.
• Prices are estimates, not appraisals. They reflect what comparable cards are selling for, which is not a guarantee of what yours will sell for. Owlex is not financial advice.

If Owlex has misidentified a card or shown you a price you believe is wrong, tell us — a wrong scan is a training signal and a wrong price is a bug. Email support@owlex.co.uk with the card and what you expected.

support@owlex.co.uk reaches support, press and everything else. See also our Privacy Policy and Terms & Conditions.

Articles on the Owlex blog are written by Owlex, who builds the card recognition model, the pricing pipeline and the app itself.