Stash tracks two prices per item: going rate (what it’s worth right now) and sold price (what you actually got). Combined with acquired_price + shipping, you get real-time P/L on your whole collection.
How the going rate is set
Every book shows one going rate, chosen in this order:
- Your manual price, if you’ve set one. It always wins.
- Market price: the current market value, aggregated from multiple reputable data points.
- Estimate: when no market price is available yet, Stash shows an estimated value.
A small label next to each price tells you where it came from:
- Market: a live market value, aggregated from multiple reputable data points and refreshed automatically.
- Estimated: an approximate value Stash computes when a book doesn’t have a market price yet.
- Manual: a price you set yourself. It overrides automatic pricing and is never changed by Stash.
Pricing updates automatically in the background. No setup required on Collector and above.
The three labels you will see
Every value carries the label of where it came from, so you always know what you are looking at. They are never blended into one number.
- Market: what books are actually changing hands for. Built from several independent, reputable data points that track real market behaviour, cross-checked against each other. This is what you’d realistically sell at, and it’s the number Stash uses as your going rate. It shows when it was last synced.
- Estimated: no market data for that book yet, so the number is worked out from era, key status, and condition. It is a bracket for a thin market, not a sale price. Treat it as the starting point for your own research.
- Manual: a number you typed, because you have an appraisal or a comparable sale you trust more. Nothing overwrites it.
Published price guides are a different thing again. They are compiled periodically and tend to sit above what books actually sell for, so Stash does not republish one as your value. Where you want that figure for insurance, enter it as a Manual price on the books that warrant it.
Why you can trust the market price
Pricing is the hardest part of collecting and speculating, so it’s worth explaining how we get there.
- Multiple independent sources. We don’t depend on any single feed. Values come from several reputable data points that measure real market activity, so one bad reading doesn’t move your number.
- Sources are cross-checked. When they agree, we combine them. When they disagree sharply we don’t split the difference. We favour the source that’s more precise about that specific edition and printing year. The most common pricing error in this hobby is a famous issue’s value being attached to a later reprint of the same title, and this is what prevents it.
- Edition and condition aware. Graded slabs and raw copies are priced from different data. A 9.8 slab price is never used to value your reader copy, or the reverse.
- Kinds of value are never mixed. Market activity vs. published guides, raw vs. graded. Each stays in its own lane.
- Outliers are filtered. Where collectors contribute pricing data, it has to agree across independent collections before it affects anything, and values far from the consensus are discarded.
How the estimate works
Some books have no market price yet. Obscure issues, small print runs, very recent releases. For those, Stash shows an Estimated value marked with a ~. It’s a starting point, not a market read, and it’s a last resort: any real market price, and always your own manual price, takes precedence.
The estimate accounts for:
- Publication era: Golden, Silver, Bronze and Modern age books have very different baselines.
- Key status: first issues, first appearances and other significant issues carry a premium over a common book of the same age.
- Condition: your grade scales the value along a standard condition curve.
- Collector consensus: where several collections have independently priced the same book, that agreement feeds in.
Treat an estimate as a placeholder. If you know better, set a manual price. Yours always wins.
Pressing, cleaning, and slabbing
When you scan a comic’s cover in the Stash mobile app, you get a condition read. Where it’s worth doing, you also get an investment analysis: what a treatment would cost, what it would likely add, and whether that clears. The point is to stop you spending $150 slabbing a $40 book.
Pressing and cleaning
The scan flags visible defects and recommends a treatment only when it sees something worth treating:
- Pressing (typically $15–$35). For bends, spine roll, and non-colour-breaking creases. Pressing can lift a grade; it can’t repair a tear or restore colour.
- Cleaning (typically $10–$25). For surface dirt and residue.
Each recommendation is shown as an investment: estimated cost, estimated value uplift, and the net between them. A successful press and clean together tend to lift value meaningfully more than either alone, and the estimate reflects that, conservatively. If the scan finds nothing worth treating, it says so rather than inventing work.
Should you slab it?
Slabbing (professional grading and encapsulation) is costed all-in, not just the grading fee:
- Grading fee, which scales with the book’s value and age. A modern common book sits at the bottom tier, pre-1975 books and higher-value books step up, and very valuable books are charged as a percentage of value.
- Shipping both ways plus handling. A fixed cost that is easy to forget, and often what sinks a marginal book.
- Pressing and cleaning, if recommended. Anything worth grading is usually worth prepping first, so it’s folded into the total rather than quoted separately.
- Signature authentication, per signature, if the book is signed.
That total is compared against what the book would likely be worth graded, using real graded market data for that issue where we have it. Two grades are shown, a strong result and a more conservative one, because grading outcomes vary and the optimistic number alone would be misleading.
Stash only recommends slabbing when both are true:
- the book is a key: non-key slabs are harder to sell and rarely return the cost; and
- the conservative grade outcome still clears the all-in cost, not just the optimistic one.
For everything else the advice is simply: don’t slab it, protect it in an acrylic case. That’s usually the right answer, and it’s the one that costs you nothing.
These are estimates to inform a decision, not quotes. Grader fees and turnaround change, press results vary with the specific defect, and the grade you actually receive is the grader’s call. Treat the numbers as a floor for saying no, not a promise of return.
Run pricing
A run is 3+ consecutive issues of one volume, whether you added them together or collected them over time. It’s priced at the combined value of its books plus 10%. A complete run sells for more than the sum of its individual issues, so Stash prices it that way. The premium shows on the run in the series view and is rolled into your collection total.
Manual prices
Some items need a hand-set price. Signed slabs, raw graded books, niche variants. Just edit the price field on the item; that locks it as a manual override. Use Revert to auto to clear the override and fall back to the market price or estimate.
P/L math
For every item:
- Cost basis = acquired_price + shipping_cost
- Unrealized gain = going_rate − cost_basis (in-stock + listed items)
- Realized gain = sold_price − cost_basis (sold items)
Dashboard rollups sum each per workspace. Sold items contribute to realized P/L; everything else contributes to unrealized.
From the AI assistant
The MCP connector exposes sync_price_for_item, so you can ask Claude or ChatGPT to refresh a price (“update the going rate on my Action Comics #1”). Same rules apply. Manual prices stay manual.
Gotchas
- Automatic pricing requires Collector or above. On the free plan you can still set going rate manually or via AI (“set Spider-Man 129 going rate to $200”).
- Books without enough market data fall back to an estimated value (shown with a
~) until a market price is found. - Pricing fields are USD. Don’t mix currencies in one workspace.