About Sporta, the Sports Card Scanner App

Who builds Sporta?

Sporta is designed and developed for iPhone and iPad by Joseph AG., an indie iOS developer and the creator of Sporta. The guides on this site are published under the same name.

Sporta is an independent app. Grading companies, card manufacturers and leagues are named on this site only to describe cards, and none of them makes or endorses Sporta.

Every collector eventually faces a stack of cards and the same four questions: what exactly is this card, which version of it do I have, what is it worth, and is it worth grading? Answering them by hand means reading the fine print on the back, working out whether the card is a base card or a parallel, searching sold listings under a few different spellings, and checking corners under a lamp. Then you do it again for the next card.

That is slow whether you have just opened a hobby box, inherited a binder from a relative, or found a shoebox of cards in the attic. Sporta exists to put those steps in one place on the phone you already carry: scan the card, see what it is along with an estimated value from recent sales, get an estimated first read on its condition, and keep it in a collection that follows you from device to device.

The app is for anyone asking "what is this card?" or "is it worth anything?", from first-time collectors and parents of young collectors to flippers, breakers and long-time collectors sorting a big box.

How does Sporta work?

Sporta scans, values, pre-grades and stores cards, and each step has limits worth knowing before you rely on it.

Scanning and identification

You photograph the front of a card and, ideally, the back. The photos are sent to Sporta's cloud service, where AI reads the printed text much like OCR software and returns the player, year, brand and set, card number, parallel or variation, serial numbering, team and position, plus flags for a rookie card, an autograph or a memorabilia piece. The result is then matched to a large catalog of real sports cards.

When the match is uncertain, the app says so with a Similar Match and a match percentage and asks you to confirm. When a card cannot be matched at all, it still gives you the identification but tells you there is no live market value. The guide to identifying a sports card explains how to double-check any result yourself.

Values

Values come from recent sales data supplied by a sports-card market-data provider, and they refresh throughout the day. What you see is an estimate built from recent sales of comparable copies, shown alongside those sold comps, a price history and values by grade. It is not an appraisal, and a thin or unusual market can make any estimate less reliable. Sporta does not buy or sell cards and does not link to marketplaces. The walkthrough on pricing a card from sold comps shows the method behind the number.

Pre-grades

The AI also looks at the photos for centering, corners, edges and surface, and gives the card a condition score from 0 to 10 with a breakdown of those four areas. In the app's own words, it is an "Estimated pre-grade from photo analysis. Not an official grade." It does not predict what a grading company will assign, Sporta does not submit cards for grading, and it does not authenticate autographs or detect altered cards. The guide on how to pre-grade a sports card covers checking condition by hand.

Your Vault

Cards you save go into your Vault, a collection tied to your account and synced to the cloud, with binders you can name and color-code. Signing in with Apple or Google is required, and that account is what lets the Vault follow you to a new device. The privacy policy spells out what is stored and which services process your photos.

What Sporta covers

Five sports are in scope: baseball, basketball, football, soccer and hockey. Trading card games, Pokémon and Magic: The Gathering included, are not. You need an iPhone or iPad on iOS 26 or iPadOS 26 or later, or a Mac with Apple silicon, which the App Store also lists; there is no Android or web version, and every scan needs an internet connection. Sporta is free to download; further use is available through in-app purchases, shown inside the app. The Sporta app guide tours every screen.

What can you expect from Sporta's guides?

The guides on this site are written to be the page you would want open next to you at a card show table. Each one follows the same rules:

Practical. Every guide shows how to do something: read a card back, measure centering, find sold comps, store a card safely. You should be able to follow it with or without the app.
Checked. Statements about Sporta are checked against the app itself. Industry facts are kept to what is well established, and anything that cannot be verified is left out rather than guessed.
No hype. No promises that a card will rise, no invented statistics, no made-up testimonials.
No prices of specific cards. Markets move, so the guides explain how to find a card's value instead of quoting what a named card is worth.
No investment advice. Cards are a hobby first. Nothing on this site is financial advice, and no guide tells you to buy or sell.
Honest about limits. When Sporta is not the right tool, or when its numbers are only estimates, the guides say so.

If you are new to the hobby, sports card collecting for beginners is a good place to start.

Corrections are welcome

If you spot a mistake in a guide, whether it is a wrong set name, an outdated step or an unclear explanation, email the details and the page it appeared on. Confirmed corrections are made on the page itself.

How do you get in touch?

For questions, feedback or corrections, email denw3n@gmail.com. For help with purchases, sign-in, your account or scanning, the support page answers the most common questions first.