Case Study

PrintedPrice.com

A full-stack, edge-hosted platform, designed, built and operated by Proxy IT, that helps collectors buy trading cards at the price printed on the box.

451retailers vetted and tracked
100-ptpublic, formula-based store report card
5card games: Pokémon, Lorcana, One Piece, Riftbound, Gundam
0accounts, affiliate links or paid placements
printedprice.com
PrintedPrice.com homepage showing fair-price products and an open buying window
PrintedPrice.com on a phone
The Problem
Fair prices exist. Finding them, and getting in line before the bots, was the hard part.

Sealed trading-card products routinely sell for far above their suggested retail price. Bots sweep inventory the moment it drops, and the information about which stores sell at MSRP, and when and how to get in line, lived behind paid Discord servers.

Collectors needed one trustworthy, independent place to answer three questions: what is a fair price right now, what can I buy now, and what is coming?

What We Built

One platform, three questions answered

From raw retailer signals to a clear answer in seconds, without making anyone create an account.

Deals

Fair-price inventory

A live view of products at or under the box price, surfacing vetted shops and filtering out scalper listings.

Windows

Buying-window tracker

Queues, drawings, lotteries and pre-orders consolidated into one timeline of live and upcoming opportunities across retailers.

Report Card

Transparent store grades

Every major retailer scored on a published formula, re-scored after each big release, with the evidence behind each point.

Releases

Calendar & set guides

Upcoming launches with MSRP, pre-order status and the shops selling at fair prices, per game and per set.

Alerts

No-account alerts

Double opt-in email alerts the moment a queue, drawing or pre-order opens, with delivery tracking and automatic bounce suppression.

Guides

Retailer & collector guides

Shopping playbooks for specific stores and products, plus a searchable glossary linked inline from the guides.

printedprice.com/deals
Fair-price inventory page listing products at or under MSRP
Deals: live inventory at or under the box price, with the store and when it was last checked.
printedprice.com/windows
Buying windows page showing an open retailer invitation
Windows: every open queue, drawing, lottery and pre-order, with clear next steps.
Scoring Model

A grade you can audit

The store report card is a 100-point model with published weights. Pricing is scored against MSRP directly: at or under earns full marks, and every percent over costs points.

Evidence is tiered, so a documented policy and an absence of reports are never treated the same. Methodology is evaluated per game, and stores are re-scored after every big release.

Price
40
Fair access
30
Drop reliability
15
Transparency
15
printedprice.com/report-card
Store report card with scored retailers and sourced evidence
Under the Hood

Built on the edge, run like production

One Cloudflare Worker renders every page, serves the public APIs, runs the scheduled jobs and handles webhooks. It is about a hundred first-party modules with no third-party runtime libraries.

Edge compute

Cloudflare Workers render pages on request and run the scheduled jobs, with isolated production and dev environments.

Data

Cloudflare D1 (SQL) stores shops, listings and an append-only event history. A separate alerts database keeps subscriber and consent data isolated.

History & backups

R2 object storage holds regular, checksummed backups and long-term history archives.

State & caching

KV and the edge cache hold computed results, so pages stay fast while data refreshes behind them.

From a retailer's shelf to a collector's inbox

1

Read

A dedicated reader service checks each shop's public catalog on a regular schedule, identifying itself honestly and pacing its requests to respect every store.

2

Normalize

Product names are converted to canonical names, and singles, lots, graded items and pickup-only listings are filtered out before anything is priced.

3

Verify

Each listing is matched to its MSRP. Prices that look too good to be true are cross-checked before anyone sees them.

4

Detect

Every read is compared with the last one. Restocks, sell-outs and price changes become events in an append-only history.

5

Alert

Subscribers get a one-time, idempotent alert per event and channel. Email is double opt-in, unsubscribing takes one click, and bounces and complaints are suppressed automatically.

01

Trust is earned, then kept

New shops are vetted before they go live, and unusual pricing is flagged for review automatically.

02

Evidence over assumption

Report-card points carry their source, and buying windows need corroboration before they reach anyone's inbox.

03

It watches itself

Built-in health checks catch data gaps and stale feeds, and confirm when they recover. Metrics flow to Grafana for observability.

04

Secure by default

Hardened security headers, verified third-party callbacks and least-privilege access for every internal service.

05

Privacy first

No accounts and no cookies. Usage counts are aggregate only, and consent is recorded with a version and method for every subscriber.

06

Roll out safely

New data sources and features are trialled alongside live ones, so changes are proven before they reach users.

Integrations CloudflareStripeResendGrafana
Why It Matters

The same discipline, applied to your business

PrintedPrice is our own product, held to the standard we set for client work.

01

IT Strategy & Planning

Turning a fuzzy market problem into a focused product roadmap and a sustainable operating model.

02

Data Management & Analytics

Reliable ingestion, normalisation and history, so decisions rest on data you can trust and trace.

03

Network & Cloud Infrastructure

Edge-hosted architecture with environment separation, caching and backups built in from day one.

04

Cybersecurity & Privacy

Consent tracking, suppression handling and minimal data collection as defaults, not afterthoughts.

Have a platform in mind?

Whether it's a new product, a data pipeline or a move to the edge, let's talk it through. No pitch, just a conversation.