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 marketplace sources.
- 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 marketplace sources 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.
Run pricing
A run — 3+ consecutive issues of one volume, whether you added them together or collected them over time — is 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. Manually-priced items are never changed by automatic pricing or by the AI connector’s sync_price_for_item tool. 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.