We love collecting. We hated the economics.

Every card you sell somewhere else pays a toll. A double-digit final-value fee, a per-order charge, sometimes a buyer’s premium on top. On a $100 card that is real money, and on a collection it is a lot of real money — money that came out of the hobby and did not go to anyone in it.

OffMarketCards takes 0% seller commission on every sale, at every card value. Not as an introductory rate and not as a tier you upgrade into. It is a constant in the code and a constraint in the database: a listing with a commission on it cannot be written.

What that does is leave a gap where the fee used to be, and the gap goes to the two people who were paying it. A seller can set an item price that returns more than the same sale would have left them elsewhere while the buyer pays less than they would have paid. Both, out of the same money. That is the entire idea, and the arithmetic is on the How it works page so you can check it rather than take our word.

The rest follows from treating a card as a permanent record rather than a listing. A card has a page here whether or not anybody is selling one, and that page does not disappear when the sale ends. Its grade, its certification and the physical copy in somebody’s box are kept as separate facts, because they are separate facts.

We are early and we say so on the pages it affects. Buying is not open — there is no checkout, payment or order yet. Several things a membership will include are built and waiting on a data licence, and they are marked that way rather than sold. When we do not know a number, we leave a gap and name what is missing instead of filling it with something plausible.