Terms of Use

Acceptable use

Permitted use

Cardboard Alpha is provided for personal, non-commercial reference: reading pages, researching a card or product, and tracking a watchlist.

Subscriptions, trials and renewal

Pro and Terminal are paid subscriptions, billed monthly or yearly at the price shown when you subscribe, plus any sales tax shown at checkout. A free trial lasts 3 days and is offered once per person. By starting a trial or subscription you authorize us (or Apple or Google, if you subscribe in our app) to charge your payment method when the trial ends and at the start of each billing period after it. Your subscription renews automatically at the then-current price until you cancel. We will email you before any price change and before a yearly plan renews. Cancelling: on the web, cancel online any time in Settings → Billing → Manage; in the app, cancel in your App Store or Google Play subscription settings at least 24 hours before renewal. Cancelling stops the next charge, and you keep access until the paid period ends. Cancel during a trial and you are not charged. Refunds: web charges are not prorated. If you were charged for a renewal you did not mean to keep, contact us within 14 days of the charge and we will refund it. Apple and Google handle refunds for App Store and Google Play purchases under their own policies. Ending a plan deletes nothing: features above the Free limits pause, and they resume if you subscribe again. Full pricing is at /pricing.

Not financial advice

Everything on this site is informational market data about collectibles. Prices, fair values, scores, depth figures, regimes and recommendations are the output of models run over observed market activity — they are not financial, investment, tax or legal advice, not a solicitation or an offer to transact, and not a prediction of what any card will be worth. Collectible card prices are volatile and often illiquid; a figure shown here may not be a price at which anything can actually be bought or sold. A label such as BUY or SELL is a research classification, never a recommendation to you. Do your own research, and decide for yourself.

No automated access

You may not access the site with a crawler, spider, scraper, headless browser, browser automation framework, or any other automated agent, except as expressly permitted by /robots.txt and within the crawl delays it publishes. Automated clients that identify themselves honestly and stay inside those delays are welcome; ones that do not are refused.

No bulk collection or reproduction

You may not download, copy, index, cache, mirror, or otherwise reproduce a substantial part of the data on this site, whether by one request or by many; nor compile it into a dataset, model corpus, or derived product for redistribution or resale. Quoting an individual figure with attribution and a link back is fine. Card artwork shown here remains the property of its rights holders and is not this project’s to license onward.

No circumvention

You may not evade or attempt to evade a rate limit, block, or challenge — by rotating IP addresses or identities, spoofing a User-Agent, forging fetch-metadata headers, or using a proxy pool. A 429 is a request to slow down; a 403 is a refusal. Treat both as terms of this agreement, not as obstacles.

Programmatic access

The supported route for a program is the documented read-only API and the plain-Markdown page twins (/pokemon/{set}/{card}.md), described at /developers and /llms.txt. It requires an API key, issued once an application there is approved by hand, and sent as Authorization: Bearer <key>. A key is personal to the account it was issued to: do not share, resell or pool one. Use is subject to the published per-key rate limits and to every clause above — a documented endpoint is not a licence to bulk-collect through it, and a key that is used to may be revoked.

Accounts, alerts and portfolios

Account features (watchlists, alerts, portfolios) are for the account holder. Do not share credentials, automate account actions, or use alert delivery to relay this site’s data to a third party at scale.

Contacts and finding friends

Finding friends from your contacts is optional and starts only when you tap “Sync contacts” in the app and agree. If you do, you agree that the app uploads one-way hashes of the phone numbers and email addresses in your address book, and that we store those hashes (never the numbers, addresses or names themselves) to match you with people in your contacts who join Cardboard Alpha later and to tell you when they do. Only sync contacts you are entitled to share this way. If a phone number or email address you verify on your own account matches hashes another member stored, that member is linked to you as a friend and sees your display name and collection total on their leaderboard; you can remove contact-made links in the app at any time. You can delete your stored hashes at any time in Settings → Remove contact data, or ask us to, and deleting your account deletes them. Hashes are not shared or sold and are used for nothing but this matching. See the Privacy Policy.

User content and conduct (zero tolerance)

Live chat messages, show titles and descriptions, seller profiles, and any other content you post are yours, and by posting you agree not to post content that is objectionable: harassment, hate speech, sexual content, threats, spam, scams, illegal goods, or content that infringes someone else’s rights. There is zero tolerance for objectionable content or abusive users. Content is filtered automatically before it is posted, and any user can report a message or user, and block a user, from within the app. Every report is reviewed by a person; content found to be objectionable is removed and the offending account is suspended or removed, within 24 hours of the report. To reach us about anything on this page, use /contact. For the iOS app, these Terms serve as the end-user license agreement (EULA) between you and Cardboard Alpha, together with Apple’s Licensed Application End User License Agreement.

Live giveaways — official rules

A giveaway run during a Live show is free to enter; no purchase is necessary to enter or win, and a purchase does not improve your odds. Entry is open to signed-in Cardboard Alpha account holders who are 18 or older (or the age of majority where you live), where legal; void where prohibited. One entry per account per giveaway. When the seller closes the giveaway, a winner is drawn at random from the entries and notified in the app. The prize is the physical item shown in the giveaway, shipped free by the seller to the winner’s saved address, or held in the winner’s Vault if they choose. Cardboard Alpha administers the drawing and is the sponsor of each giveaway on behalf of the platform; the seller supplies the prize. Apple Inc. is not a sponsor of, and is not involved in, any giveaway in any way. A prize that goes unclaimed, or that cannot be delivered, may be redrawn. Questions go to /contact.

Text message alerts

Cardboard Alpha text messages are opt-in: adding and verifying a mobile number in sign-up or settings enrols it to receive verification codes, the price and deal alerts you set up, and Live show alerts. Message frequency varies with the alerts you configure. Message and data rates may apply. Reply STOP to any message to cancel, or HELP for help; you can also turn texts off in settings. Carriers are not liable for delayed or undelivered messages. How a number is handled is set out in the privacy policy.

No warranty

Market data is supplied as it is observed, with gaps left visible. A null is a genuine coverage gap, never an interpolated placeholder, and no figure here is a guarantee of a price you can transact at. The site is provided “as is”, without warranty of any kind.

Referral program

Every member has a referral link. When someone who joins through it becomes a qualified member, the member who shared it earns Cardboard coins; the person who joined earns nothing from the referral. Rewards are coins only, have no cash value, cannot be exchanged for money, and are paid to the inviter alone. Monthly and lifetime caps apply and may change. Referring yourself, creating accounts to claim rewards, or any other fraud or abuse voids the rewards involved and may close the accounts. Affiliate status is applied for, granted at our discretion, and may be revoked at any time. An approved affiliate also earns a commission, paid in coins, on web subscription payments (not in-app purchases) made by accounts they referred, for a limited period, only after a hold period, and subject to reversal if a payment is refunded, voided or disputed. We may change or end the program at any time.

Enforcement and changes

Access may be rate-limited, challenged or refused at any time, by user agent, network, or behaviour, without notice. These terms may change; the date above is when the substance last did. Continued use after a change is acceptance of it.

Related

• /pricing — Pro and Terminal plans, prices and the compare table.
• /robots.txt — the allow-list, per-crawler crawl delays, and the crawlers refused outright.
• /developers — the read-only API and its response envelope.
• /llms.txt — orientation for LLM crawlers and agents.