Value checkers by category

40 free value checkers. Each one tells you which photos to take and what buyers pay for in that kind of item. Not sure what you have? Use the general estimator.

How to pick the right one

The category you choose changes what the estimator looks for, so it is worth a moment rather than a guess. Picking Coins tells it to read a date and a mint mark and to judge wear on the high points; picking Watches tells it to hunt for a reference number and to treat a refinished dial as a serious deduction. The same photograph assessed under two different categories will produce two different answers, and the more specific one is almost always the better one.

If an item sits between two categories, choose the one whose buyers set the price. A silver pocket watch is valued by watch collectors rather than by its metal content, so it belongs under watches, not under gold and silver. A signed baseball is valued by autograph collectors rather than by sports memorabilia in general. A piece of studio pottery is valued as art rather than as tableware. When you genuinely cannot tell, leave the picker on Let the AI decide and add a line of context in the notes field, which is often more useful than forcing a category.

When no category fits

Plenty of things do not belong to a collecting category at all, and the estimator still works on them. A power tool, a bicycle, a musical instrument nobody collects, a piece of garden machinery: these have real second-hand markets driven by condition and working order rather than by rarity, and they are often easier to value accurately than a collectable, because there is no question of authenticity and no premium hiding in a detail. Leave the category unset, photograph the model plate, and say in the notes whether it runs.

What every category page gives you

Each one opens with the estimator, preset for that kind of item, and then covers four things that do not change with the market: which photographs actually improve an estimate for that category, what creates value in it, how condition is judged in that category’s own vocabulary, and the mistakes that cost owners money before they ever list anything. Several of those mistakes are irreversible — cleaning a coin, refinishing furniture, washing a doll’s hair, opening a sealed set — which is why the pages lead with them rather than burying them.

The pages also say plainly where a category has declined. Traditional furniture, mass-market china, collectable figurines and Beanie Babies were all marketed as investments and have all fallen a long way, and a page that repeated optimistic figures from twenty years ago would be useless to somebody clearing a house today. Where a professional opinion genuinely changes the number, the page says that too, along with the point at which paying for grading or an appraisal stops making sense.