The app
OtterDex is not on the App Store or Google Play, and there is no date — this page describes an app still being built rather than one you can install today. Everything on this website works now, in this browser, whether or not you ever install anything.
The phone reads first. A model is the fallback.
Every modern card carries a line of small print naming its printing — the set code and the collector number. Reading that line is the whole product, and where your phone can read it, the picture never leaves the phone.
On four of the five games that line runs along the card’s bottom edge; on Yu-Gi-Oh! it sits just under the artwork. Your phone reads it with the text recognition built into iOS and Android — the recogniser the operating system already uses everywhere else — and sends the handful of characters it read, not the picture, to be resolved against the catalogue.
The reader is never asked which card it is, only what is printed on it. The catalogue decides which printing that address belongs to, and disqualifies the ones it cannot be — which is why a scan can come back with three cards and no opinion about which of them you are holding. That last step is a page on this website as well: Find a card by its code takes the same line, typed rather than read, and answers it out of the same catalogue.
Where the phone cannot read the line — an older Pokémon card that prints a symbol and no letters, glare off a sleeve, too steep an angle — the photograph is cropped to the card on the phone and sent to be read by a model instead. It is used for that one reading and is not stored. Support has what to do when a scan will not read.
There is no account, and no copy of your collection on our servers: it lives in a database on the phone that scanned it, is backed up with the rest of your phone, and can be written to a file you keep. Whether you have paid is checked on the phone against the store’s own receipt, not against a server of ours. Privacy sets out every request the app makes, what is kept and for how long.
Three answers, and never a fourth.
A scan resolves to one printing, to a few, or to nothing at all. The fourth answer — a confident guess — is the only truly bad outcome, because a wrong card you never notice is a collection you can no longer trust.
It found the card
The set code and number resolved to one printing, and the name agrees. You get the card and its price.
It found a few
Several printings fit what it read. You pick, because you are holding the card and it is not.
It could not read it
Too dark, too angled, or a printing the catalogue does not have yet. It says which, and you scan again.
What it will cost.
Scanning, what a card is worth today and export are free on every plan, signed in or not — and there is no signing in. A subscription lifts a limit. It does not unlock an answer.
Free
No payment and no sign-up, ever.
- Unlimited scanning
- Every price visible
- 100 cards in your collection
- Export whenever you want
- No account. Your collection stays on your phone.
Standard
A yearly subscription, priced by the store in your currency.
- Everything in Free
- 1,000 cards in your collection
- Price history on every card you own
Collector
A yearly subscription, priced by the store in your currency.
- Everything in Standard
- No limit on your collection
- What the whole collection has been worth, over time
There is no sign-up. Your collection is a file on your phone, backed up with everything else on it, and yours to export at any time. If your subscription lapses nothing is taken from you: the collection stays readable, exportable and yours.
OtterDex is still being built and is not on the App Store or Google Play yet. When it is, it will be linked here — and everything on this website will keep working without it.
When it is sold, it will be sold and managed by the App Store or Google Play at the price they show in your own currency. Terms says what you would be buying.