Building a weather app in 2025? You don't create your own meteorology department. Building a maps app? You don't launch satellites. Building a payment system? You don't start a bank. But building a trading card app? You better prepare to manually enter data for thousands of cards and hundreds of sets.

The absurdity isn't that this data doesn't exist - it's been collected, verified, and refined across countless platforms. The problem is that despite living in the API economy, trading card data remains trapped in isolated silos.

What the Walled Gardens Look Like

Walk through the trading card app ecosystem today and you'll find a strange pattern. One platform might have the most comprehensive pricing data, updated daily from actual sales. Another has meticulously verified checklists for sets going back to the 1880s. A third has millions of high-quality card images and user-generated condition reports. Each platform has spent years—sometimes decades—building something valuable and unique.

The quality is impressive. The coverage is vast. The attention to detail is remarkable.

But if you're a developer building a new card app, these data treasures might as well be buried on a desert island. There's no bridge between them, no way to access or build upon this collective knowledge. Want pricing data? Build your own. Need set checklists? Start typing. Card images? Hope you have a good camera.

Why This Should Feel Familiar (And Wrong)

This should sound familiar, because we've been here before. Not that long ago, every mobile app that needed a map had to build their own mapping system. Every e-commerce site built their own payment processing. Every application that needed user authentication rolled their own login system.

Then APIs happened. Google Maps gave developers mapping data. Stripe handled payments. Auth0 managed logins. The transformation wasn't just about convenience—it was about unlocking innovation. When developers stopped spending months building basic infrastructure, they could focus on what made their app unique. Better user experiences. Novel features. Solutions to problems that hadn't been solved before.

APIs also meant better data quality. Instead of hundreds of companies maintaining mediocre maps, we got one great mapping service that improved with every user. Instead of thousands of amateur payment systems, we got robust, secure financial infrastructure built by experts.

But somehow, trading card data got left behind. While the rest of the software world moved toward shared infrastructure and interoperability, card data remained locked in proprietary silos, forcing every new developer to reinvent the wheel.

The Ripple Effects

The cost of this data isolation ripples through the entire ecosystem in ways both obvious and subtle.

For developers, it's a massive innovation tax. Instead of spending time on unique features—better portfolio analytics, smarter collection recommendations, innovative trading mechanisms—teams burn months just getting basic card data into their systems. How many great ideas never make it to market because the barrier to entry is building an entire card database from scratch?

For users, it's death by a thousand data entry cuts. Every new app means re-entering the same collection. Every platform switch means abandoning years of carefully catalogued data. The promise of digital convenience gets buried under manual busywork that shouldn't exist in 2025.

And for the hobby itself, it means stagnation. When data can't flow between platforms, we can't get the cross-platform insights that would benefit everyone. Price comparison becomes impossible. Market analysis stays fragmented. Innovation slows to the pace of whoever is willing to rebuild the foundation.

Coming Up

The trading card data problem isn't going away on its own. In fact, as more apps launch and more data gets locked away, it's getting worse.

Over the coming weeks, I'll be diving deeper into this issue. We'll look at the real cost of these data silos—not just in developer hours, but in the innovation that never happens. We'll explore why data mobility matters for collectors and how it could transform the hobby. And we'll examine what it would take to build a more open, interoperable future for trading card data.

This isn't just a technical problem—it's holding back an entire industry. But the solution isn't as complicated as you might think.

What's your experience with trading card data? Have you built an app and faced this problem? Are you a collector frustrated by data lock-in? I'd love to hear your stories in the comments below.