Pokémon TCG APIs Compared: Scrydex, JustTCG, PriceCharting

If you searched for a Pokémon card price API this year, you found a different market than someone searching two years ago. The two marketplaces that hold the actual sales data both stopped handing out keys. The free API a lot of hobby projects started on now has a monthly price. What is left is a handful of independent services, each with a different idea of what "price" means and a different bill at the end of the month.

This post goes through them one at a time. We run one of them, so read the PkmnPrices section with that in mind. Every number below was taken from the provider's own site on 6 September 2026, and the links go to the pages we took them from.

Two doors that closed

TCGplayer's own API was the obvious source for US prices, and for years the answer to "how do I get TCGplayer prices" was "apply for a key". The getting started page now reads: "We are not currently granting new API access at this time." Existing key holders keep theirs. Nobody new gets one.

Cardmarket is the same story for European prices. Its help page says: "Currently, we are not accepting applications for access to the Cardmarket API." The API documentation URL now returns HTTP 410 Gone.

Both marketplaces still publish prices on their websites, so every API in this post is, one way or another, reading those pages and reselling the numbers. That is worth keeping in mind when a provider describes its data as "official".

The free API that became a subscription

For most of a decade, pokemontcg.io was the default. Free, well documented, a card database with TCGplayer and Cardmarket prices attached, 20,000 requests a day with a key. A lot of Discord bots and collection trackers started there.

Its homepage now says the Pokémon TCG API "is now part of Scrydex". The old api.pokemontcg.io endpoints still answered when we tested them for this post, and the old docs are still online, but the project has moved on to a paid product with no free tier. If you built on it, you will be moving at some point. The rest of this post is about where.

The short version

The rest of the post is the detail behind each row.

PkmnPrices

This is us, so here is the pitch and then the caveats.

The API covers 70,000+ Pokémon cards and 5,900+ sealed products in English, Japanese, and German, with prices refreshed daily from TCGplayer, Cardmarket, and eBay. What makes it different from the others in this list is how far it goes below the headline number. Every card returns a price per condition and per printing. Price history is daily closes going back up to a year. Listings endpoints return the live offers on TCGplayer and Cardmarket, and the eBay endpoint returns individual sold comps, each with its grade, its sale date, and a link back to the listing, so you can check the number yourself.

Most APIs hand you a "PSA 10 price" and ask you to trust it. Ours hands you the sales it came from.

There are twelve documented endpoints, an in-page playground in the docs, and official SDKs for JavaScript and Python. The free tier is 500 credits a day. Pro is $14.99 a month for 20,000 credits a day and Business is $89.99 for 200,000.

The gaps: it is Pokémon only, so if your app also needs Magic or Lorcana you will be integrating a second API. The free tier is English cards only, has no price history or listings, and is for non-commercial use. There is no image recognition. And like Scrydex and Pokemon Price Tracker, it counts credits rather than requests, so read the rate limits page before estimating your bill.

Pick it if you need prices below the headline number: conditions, printings, history, or the actual sales behind a graded price, and Pokémon is the only game you care about.

Scrydex

Scrydex is where pokemontcg.io went. It is now a multi-game API: Pokémon, Magic, Lorcana, Yu-Gi-Oh!, One Piece, Gundam, and Riftbound, with more marked "soon". The card data is the deepest of any provider here, because it inherited the pokemontcg.io database: attacks, abilities, weaknesses, legalities, artist, regulation mark, all of it. It adds raw and graded prices with trend deltas over 1, 7, 14, 30, and 90 days, population reports, and a Vision API that identifies a card from a photo.

Pricing starts at $29 a month for 5,000 credits a month, then $99 for 50,000 and $399 for 250,000, with per-credit overage on each. Note the unit: those are monthly credits, and Scrydex's own calculator puts the Starter plan at roughly 160 requests a day. A price history call costs 3 credits and a Vision call costs 5. There is no free tier listed.

Pick it if you are building across several card games, you need the full card text and legality data, or you want image recognition. If you only need Pokémon prices, you are paying for a lot of catalog you will not use.

Pokemon Price Tracker

Pokemon Price Tracker is the closest thing to a direct competitor to us: Pokémon only, prices from TCGplayer, eBay, and Cardmarket, updated daily, with PSA 8, 9, and 10 values derived from eBay completed listings.

The API plan is the cheapest paid tier in this comparison at $9.99 a month for 20,000 credits a day, with six months of price history. The free tier is 100 credits a day. Business is $99 a month for 200,000 credits and 500 requests a minute.

The surface is small: four endpoints covering cards, card history, sets, and sealed products. There are no listings endpoints, so you get an aggregate graded price rather than the sales it came from, and graded coverage stops at PSA. No SDK; the docs show a Node.js example.

Pick it if you want the lowest monthly bill for Pokémon prices and a single number per card is all your app displays.

JustTCG

JustTCG covers 18 games with 279,000+ cards and over a million variants. Its distinguishing claim is that it blends online marketplace prices with real in-store sales from 45 or more partnered game stores, using a volume-weighted average. Whether that makes the number better depends on whether your users buy in stores or online, but it is a source nobody else in this list has.

Plans: free at 100 requests a day and 1,000 a month; Starter $19 a month for 1,000 a day; Professional $49 a month for 5,000 a day, which is also where historical price trends unlock. Graded card support for PSA, BGS, and CGC is labelled beta. There is an official JavaScript SDK on npm.

Pick it if you need many games from one key, or the in-store sales signal is worth something to you.

PriceCharting

PriceCharting is a price guide first and an API second. Access requires a paid site subscription, with CSV downloads reserved for the top tier. The API is limited to one call per second and returns a product's current value in each grade and condition.

The documentation is direct about the limits: "Historic prices and historic sales are not supported." You get today's number, and if you want yesterday's you had better have saved it. Prices are returned as integer pennies.

Its strength is breadth of a different kind. PriceCharting prices video games, consoles, and several card games in one guide, so a shop that sells all of them gets one integration.

Pick it if your inventory is games and cards together, and current values are all you need.

TCGCSV

TCGCSV is not an API in the usual sense. It is a daily dump of TCGplayer's categories, groups, products, and prices, as CSV files or a JSON endpoint, updated every day around 20:00 UTC and free, with a Patreon for the person running it.

If you only need TCGplayer market prices for English cards and you are happy to import a file once a day, this is the cheapest option by a wide margin. The limits are that it is TCGplayer only, and, in the site's own words, it does not provide SKU-level pricing, so you cannot get a price per condition. No history, no graded, no eBay, no European prices.

Pick it if you want raw TCGplayer prices, your app can work from a daily import, and you do not need conditions.

What to check before you commit

Every provider above has a pricing page. Fewer of them answer the questions that decide whether an integration still works six months in.

What does one unit of the plan buy? Scrydex, Pokemon Price Tracker, and we all sell credits, and a credit is not always a request. On Scrydex a history call is three. Read the credit table before you read the headline number.

Is history stored, or computed on demand? An API that only holds current prices cannot give you a chart, and you cannot backfill what was never saved. PriceCharting and TCGCSV say so plainly. Ask the others.

Where does the graded price come from? "PSA 10: $2,687" is a claim. Ask whether you can see the sales that produced it, and if a provider will not show them, treat the figure as an estimate.

Does the free tier permit commercial use? Ours does not. Read the terms before you ship a paid app on a free key.

Which languages and regions? Most providers cover English cards and USD prices first. If you serve European or Japanese collectors, check Cardmarket coverage and Japanese card coverage separately. They are rarely both there.

A note on "official" data

None of the APIs in this post are TCGplayer or Cardmarket, and neither marketplace is issuing keys. Every price here was read off a marketplace page and reached you through someone else's pipeline. What separates the providers is how often that pipeline runs, whether it keeps what it collected, and whether it shows you the sales underneath. Those vary more between providers than the prices do.

Is there still a free Pokémon TCG API?

Yes, several. PkmnPrices has a free tier of 500 credits a day, Pokemon Price Tracker offers 100 a day, JustTCG offers 100 a day, and TCGCSV is free entirely as a daily file download. The original free option, pokemontcg.io, has become Scrydex, which starts at $29 a month.

What happened to pokemontcg.io?

Its homepage now states that the Pokémon TCG API is part of Scrydex, a paid multi-game API. As of September 2026 the old endpoints still respond and the old documentation is still online, but there is no free plan on the new product.

Can I still get a TCGplayer API key?

Not at the moment. TCGplayer's developer documentation states that it is not currently granting new API access. Existing key holders keep their access. Independent APIs, including this one, provide TCGplayer market prices instead.

Which Pokémon card price API includes eBay sold listings?

PkmnPrices returns individual eBay sold comps with grade, sale date, and a link to the listing. Pokemon Price Tracker derives PSA 8, 9, and 10 prices from eBay completed listings but returns the aggregate rather than the sales. Scrydex and JustTCG list graded prices without specifying eBay as a source on their public pages.

Which API is cheapest for a hobby project?

TCGCSV is free if you only need TCGplayer prices and can import a daily file. For a live API, the free tiers from PkmnPrices, Pokemon Price Tracker, and JustTCG all cover a small Discord bot. Among paid plans, Pokemon Price Tracker's $9.99 API tier is the lowest monthly price in this comparison.