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Last Updated On: March 6th, 2024
Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a platform that allowed one to monitor their collection’s value instantly? Or get an estimated, aggregated value on a card before pressing “Bid” on eBay? Or what about easily checking population reports across BGS, PSA, and SGC?
Turns out, there is. Card Ladder is an online database that processes thousands of daily sports card transactions, aggregating them to provide real-time values for cards. But that only scratches the surface of what this innovative platform offers.
In this post, we will provide a comprehensive Card Ladder review (spoiler alert: we love it). We’ll cover the app’s myriad features, including collection tracking, player and price indexes, its paid Card Ladder Pro version, as well as alternative card tracking apps.
By the end of this post, hopefully you’ll understand why we can’t live without it, and how you can leverage card data to make better informed buying and selling decisions.
Note: Card Ladder offers a free and paid version. We will highlight features primarily available through the paid version.
Table of Contents
Overview: Card Ladder Review
Before diving into the specific features, let’s discuss Card Ladder’s intangibles. The interface is as clean as it gets: easy to navigate, sleek, and modern. On the left-hand side, one can quickly surf between its features, while the centralized Dashboard provides a daily sales chart for the past three months.
Further, the starting page provides a “Daily Sales Recap,” which chronicles the total number of sales, gross sales, and an accuracy rating for those sales on a given day.
About a year and a half after its launch in June 2020, Card Ladder was purchased by Collectors Universe, which also owns PSA. This acquisition served as a major boost for the brand, adding legitimacy and even more credibility, with a big name now backing it.
As a disclosure, Only Greats is an affiliate of Card Ladder. Not only that, but this is a product we use heavily to make our own buying decisions. Additionally, many of our posts rely on Card Ladder’s statistics and analysis, like the Basketball Preseason Buyer’s Guide and Justin Fields Rookie Card Overview.
But at Only Greats, we aren’t just “Dedicated to Collecting”, we’re also focused on putting quality, vetted products on your radar and providing objective coverage of those products. To that end, this post will also feature areas of Card Ladder that we think are ripe for improvement, as well as a discussion of its competitors.
Card Ladder Features
It’s time to talk about features. We aren’t hitting every single Card Ladder feature here; instead, we’ll primarily focus on the ones most useful to collectors.
Sports Card Price Checks
One of the most useful aspects of Card Ladder is its price check feature. Long gone are the days of spending hours on eBay scouring sales (for comparable sales, or “comps”) to discern a card’s ballpark value; Card Ladder makes it simple by providing a card’s general value based on recent sales and the overall performance of a player’s index.
Think of this feature a bit like you would Kelley Blue Book for a car; by offering an estimate for a car’s value, KBB allows a prospective buyer to get the best deal possible. Card Ladder’s Value feature operates in a similar vein to KBB, albeit with cards.
A sub-feature of the card value perk is the price check. Card Ladder pulls from a card’s all-time online sales, meaning you have every sale point for a given card at your fingertips. For instance, if someone charges $900 for an Anthony Edwards Silver Prizm RC in Gem Mint condition, you can quickly hop over to Card Ladder and see that the card’s recent sales have hovered around $600.
Further, one can filter these results by several criteria, including date and price point. So, with our Anthony Edwards example from above, one might quickly note that $900 was the going rate for that Silver Prizm back in the summer of 2022, but not at present.
For cards with a relatively high pop-count, this pricing check works wonderfully. But for rarer cards with lower pop counts or scant sales history, the pricing model is a bit less reliable. The price point on these rarer cards better serves as a ballpark estimate; the buyer almost certainly requires additional homework before submitting a bid.
One downside: not every card is part of Card Ladder’s portfolio. But, have no fear: one can still add the card to their own Card Ladder collection and get an idea of a card’s value.
Card Ladder: track your collection, card prices, sales, & more
Collection Tracking
This brings us to another key feature behind Card Ladder’s success: the collection tracker. This isn’t exactly a novel idea; hobbyists have been storing their collections virtually since the moment Microsoft Excel came to life.
But what makes Card Ladder’s collection tracker handy is that it automatically computes a card’s value (and, by extension, a collection’s overall value).
A user can input all of the data pertaining to their card purchase: the date, sale price, and card itself. Card Ladder will then provide daily snapshots of the collection’s aggregate value via email, which can also be viewed in detail to see what card(s) moved up or down as of the previous day’s reporting period.
As we mentioned above, not every card is part of Card Ladder’s database. Yet you can still track the value of cards in your collection if this is the case. Here’s how:
For cards not yet included in Card Ladder’s database, members can add the card to their collections and utilize the index-suggested pricing model themselves. Once the member enters the date and price of their purchase of their card, Card Ladder’s software automatically syncs these data points with the appropriate player index, which allows a ratio to be generated. That ratio will then be used going forward to create a new index-suggested price for the card every day.
By using a player’s index as a relative indicator of a card’s value, Card Ladder is able to estimate the values of cards that aren’t in its database or haven’t sold in a long time.
For example, let’s say you purchased a rare Tom Brady card two years ago for $500. You can add the card to your portfolio with the price and date you purchased it. Card Ladder will use Tom Brady’s player index to arrive at an estimated “CL Value” for the card. If Brady’s index is down 30% over the last two years, Card Ladder may then estimate your card valued at $350 (down 30% since purchase). Again, this might not be the most accurate, and should be treated as a ballpark estimate.
Sports Card Price Indexes
In addition to hosting your collection and churning out card values and price points, Card Ladder operates a series of “indexes.”
The name comes from various investment indexes on the stock exchange, as an index will “…typically measure the performance of a basket of securities intended to replicate a certain area of the market.” For instance, if one wanted to determine the the overall health of the U.S. stock market, one might check out the S&P 500, an index that combines the performance of the 500 largest companies on the American stock exchange.
Card Ladder’s index operates similarly. It’s divided into sports, players, eras, pop-counts, and even a “CL50,” defined as the “50 hand-selected cards that best represent the card market” (not unlike the S&P 500).
For the math-nerds out there, here’s how the indexes are calculated:
A player’s index is calculated as follows. Every card of a player is multiplied by its “last sold” value. “Last sold” means the average value for which the card sold on the most recent day that it sold. The resulting sum is divided by the total number of cards the player has. This produces the index value. This value is calculated once per night after each day’s sales have been approved.
The indexes are an excellent way to forecast market trends related to players and sports. A buyer can quickly get an idea for players and sports on the upswing and vice versa.
If we look at the various indexes’ performances year-to-date (YTD), a few interesting trends become clear:
The Culture51 index (a hand-picked collection of the 51 culture cards that best represent the non-sports market) is doing exceptionally well. Additionally, the CL50 is on the rise as well, with a 6.15% uptick YTD.
This suggests that, although the hobby has undoubtedly cooled since the days of the pandemic, we’re far from the days of the Junk Wax Era’s panic and fallout.
Player Indexes to Track Hot & Cold Players
In addition to sport and card-based indexes, Card Ladder also offers the supremely handy player indexes. This serves as an additional indicator of which players are on the rise (and thus worth investing in to ride the momentum, or profit-take) and which are falling (and might mean it’s time to divest or buy the dip).
These indexes also catalog a player’s cards, meaning it’s easy to track the hottest basketball and football cards.
We rely on these indexes all the time to price out our own cards and get a head start on which players and cards we think will pop off in the future. For instance, in our 2023-24 basketball players to watch, we were exceptionally high on Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, guard for the Oklahoma City Thunder.
And, not to toot our own horn, but SGA’s index has been going gangbusters since the article posted in October 2023:
The player index does require a bit of grit and grind on behalf of the user. When you first explore the player index, you’ll be confronted with a list that is top-heavy with pricey stars: Michael Jordan, Mickey Mantle, Luka Doncic, etc.
For many collectors (especially beginners), these players’ cards are out of reach. But the more you explore the index, you’ll likely find lower-profile diamonds in the rough, like an SGA.
For example, Kawhi Leonard’s index is down 16% since October 2023. But if the Clippers happen to go on a deep playoff run (a reality that looks increasingly plausible if their stars remain healthy), it will likely cause Leonard’s value to surge. Thanks to Card Ladder’s index, we get a sense that it might be wise to buy-low on Leonard cards, speculating that they might increase in value as soon as this summer.
Graded Population Data
Card Ladder tracks pop counts for graded cards, serving as a one-stop shop for finding PSA, BGS, SGC, and CGC (formerly CSG) data. Since a card’s scarcity factors into it’s overall value, having each of these values at one’s fingertips is a definite bonus.
For graded cards in its database, Card Ladder will also track the population growth so that it’s easy to determine how quickly counts are rising for a given grade, and card. For example, if a card you own is climbing substantially in pop growth, it may be a good time to sell given the supply is increasing rapidly which could depress future prices.
Not every card comes with pop data, however. And given Card Ladder’s purchase by PSA, it remains to be seen if the site begins focusing exclusively on PSA pop counts as opposed to its competitors. That said, it has been over two years since the acquisition with no change in that regard. Also, recent news suggests PSA intends to purchase SGC, so it’s likely not something they’ll plan to change!
Shop Feature
And what site boasting its authority in the hobby would be complete without a shopping feature (certainly not ours!).
Card Ladder makes it easy to find cards that you’re interested in acquiring.
Card Ladder aggregates the best marketplaces to buy cards so you can save time without requiring multiple site searches to find the card you’re looking to pick up. View listings at platforms such as eBay, Goldin, PWCC, MySlabs, and Heritage Auctions. You can even filter by minimum and maximum price, and narrow results to auctions or fixed price listings only, if desired. You can even save your searches to run them again in the future.
Other Cool Features
We’d be remiss not to discuss “The Ladder” of Card Ladder. The name comes from a running tally of all of the cards in the site’s database. But that only scratches the surface of what the Ladder can do.
By selecting from a slew of various filters, users can find potential diamonds in the rough, at least insofar as Card Ladder is concerned. A personal favorite filter is the “undervalued” filter, which tracks cards that have sold recently for less than their Card Ladder value would indicate.
Things can get a little wonky with the undervalued filter. For instance, many of the most “undervalued” cards pop up because they are either ultra-rare or have incomplete Card Ladder profiles.
To curb this issue, we recommend pairing the undervalued filter with a high-ish minimum pop filter (200 is a good place to start) to find cards with more accurate sales data and, by extension, more accurate value data.
You’ll notice many of the other dropdown filters pictured above to sort or filter the Ladder, including population count, monthly pop growth, price changes within different time periods, and more. Having this data at your fingertips helps make better buying and selling decisions.
Card Ladder Pro Pricing
As we noted from the jump, Card Ladder offers both a free and paid version, known as Card Ladder Pro. While there is a free trial for one week, Card Ladder Pro costs $15 per month. A yearly subscription costs $150, which is equivalent to paying for 10 months, and getting two months for free (17% savings).
Unsurprisingly, the features we’re most high on — collection tracking, sales history and values, and population reports — aren’t available in the free version.
How you view this price-point also depends on how you view Card Ladder as a whole. In a vacuum, $150 is a lot of money. But when you consider what you’re receiving in return, that figure is a drop in the bucket for a product you will use each and every day.
I’ll say it again: if you’re a serious collector, this is a platform that you will use daily. And no matter your goals – flipping, building your PC, or casual buying – Card Ladder has features for you.
As a site that specializes in sports cards, Only Greats uses this app multiple times a day. And there are few apps that we use with a similar level of addiction.
PSA Collectors Club Premium Includes Card Ladder
If the $150 price point is too steep, there’s an alternative option to accessing Card Ladder Pro: PSA Collector’s Club Premium. With a Premium subscription to PSA Collector’s Club, users receive monthly grading specials and PSA’s lowest grading price ($15 for bulk orders). The $199 yearly subscription also comes with a Card Ladder Pro membership, which is effectively like getting Card Ladder for just $50!
Areas for Improvement
Despite the excellent features, Card Ladder is far from a perfect product. We’ve already noted how the CL values of ultra-rare cards tend to be less than trustworthy. Additionally, while many cards are included in the database, it’s far from complete.
But there’s a larger problem that sits at the intersection of these flaws. Card Ladder does an excellent job as a database for every online card purchase ever made. But when a card is sold that isn’t in its database, we often see wildly differing values for cards.
Take the Michael Jordan Retro ’97 E-X2001 Essential Credentials ‘Future’ card, one we covered in our Essential Jordan Credentials post a few months back.
Both cards below are identical: same card, same grade. But each sold for different amounts. Since this card isn’t in Card Ladder’s database, the Card Ladder value shown is based on the card’s sale price vis-a-vis the Jordan index. But since these cards are also the same wouldn’t we expect their values to be the same?
Instead, the card that sold for more is considered more valuable. This runs counter to what collectors would otherwise expect: identical valuations for identical cards.
This is where Card Ladder’s value tool is arguably most flawed. Despite these cards being identical in every way (except sale price), we have differing valuations. It makes it hard to completely trust the value tool for cards not in Card Ladder’s database. Even so, reviewing the most recent sales data — in the case of the MJ the $4,080 January ’24 record — gives collectors enough insight to make sound decisions. It’s also fair to assume Card Ladder will improve upon this issue as they invest heavily into product development — especially with PSA behind them.
Alternatives to Card Ladder
While this Card Ladder review isn’t shy mentioning it as our favorite tool of its ilk, it’s far from the only one out there. Let’s take a look at several alternatives.
Market Movers
If you’re worried about the size of Card Ladder’s database, then look no further than Market Movers. The app operates similarly to Card Ladder, with the primary focus being tracking your personal collection’s value. With 2.5 million cards in its database, Market Movers boasts the largest database of cards out there.
The downside? Price. If Card Ladder’s $150 fee is scary, buckle up.
Plans for Market Movers start at $9.99 per month (capped to only 25 cards tracked in your collection), with two additional levels – $24.99/month for Premium (track up to 250 cards) and $49.99/month for Unlimited (yes, unlimited tracking).
As opposed to Card Ladder, there is no free version of Market Movers outside of a 7-day free trial. That said, it has an extremely professional, user-friendly interface, but it’s up to the individual user as to whether they feel they get the right value for the price.
eBay Sales Data via Terapeak
If you’re primarily interested in aggregating eBay sales data to determine the right price to buy or sell a card, then eBay’s free Terapeak service could come in handy.
It’s pretty no-frills, hence why it’s free, and isn’t designed to house your collection or track it’s value. In fact, Terapeak isn’t specifically designed for any individual product; rather, it’s a one stop shop for finding sales data for any number of products sold on eBay.
Terapeak is only available through eBay’s “Seller’s Hub.”
130point.com
To access the entirety of a card’s online sales history, users can also take 130 Point for a spin. In addition to serving as a hub for online sales, 130 Point boasts checklists for both players and sports.
Unfortunately, 130 Point exists on the other end of the user-experience spectrum than Card Ladder (or even Market Movers). Users are bombarded with ads and the site is slow and feels rather dated. Completely free, users technically get what they pay for.
Summary: Card Ladder is a Must Have
We can’t stress it enough: Card Ladder is an app that packs more juice than a Florida orange. Think of it this way: instead of scrolling between eBay, MySlabs, PSA, and BGS, you get all of the information you’d need from those sites in one place.
Aside from easily tracking your card collection with the app, the #1 Card Ladder feature you’ll use most is the instant sales search to determine the value of cards. And even at the $150 annual price point, it’s far cheaper than most wax (and even many cards) you can purchase today.
If we had to put a rating on it, we’d rate Card Ladder 4.5 out of 5 stars. It’s not all perfect – the Card Ladder value can miss the mark for rare cards – but it’s one of the few card services you’ll use on a daily basis. In addition to its killer features, the peace of mind and clarity Card Ladder provides is nearly invaluable.
Have you used Card Ladder before? Which feature is your favorite? Let us know in the comments below!
Card Ladder: track your collection, card prices, sales, & more