AI card scanning, Android app

The brief

Collectors know roughly what their cards are worth and almost never know exactly. Checking means typing a card name into a marketplace, guessing at the edition, and interpreting a spread of sold prices. CardPrism does it from a photograph.

The hard part

Recognising a card from a phone camera, in ordinary lighting, at an angle, and then matching it to the right edition and printing before pricing it. Getting that wrong is worse than not answering — a collector who is told the wrong card will not trust the second answer.

What we built

• Scan to valuation. Point the camera, get the card identified by AI vision, matched against live trading card pricing data, and valued in pounds.
• Collections and portfolio. File cards into collections and track what the whole portfolio is worth over time.
• Free and Pro tiers. Usage quotas enforced on the server, with subscription billing and entitlement syncing through webhooks into the user’s record.
• Native Android app. One React codebase wrapped for Android, with native camera, in-app purchases, ads and app lifecycle handling.
• Admin panel. User management and tier control behind custom authentication claims.

Performance

The scan pipeline runs its recognition and pricing calls in parallel rather than in sequence, with a persistent HTTP client and batched database reads. The difference between a three-second scan and an eight-second one decides whether the app feels like magic or like waiting.