Missed a card by £1, so the shop owner gave him a month of membership: a one-person UK Pokémon single-card deal alert, PING
What it is You set a maximum price (including postage) for each Pokémon card you want. It watches eBay and Vinted, and when someone lists one cheaper it pushes the alert to your phone right away. Pro costs £4.99 a month.
Why it took off It rode the 30 anniversary single-card wave. eBay's built-in alerts only send one email a day. It first built up a group of collectors in its own Discord deal-hunting channel, then paid a card-community creator with 44.5k followers to promote it, and added a giveaway.
BHow you could follow Don't compete with it in the UK Pokémon niche. Pick another collectible (One Piece, sports cards, figures) or a secondhand market (Mercari, Cardmarket). Start with a group that posts good deals and has members share their wins, then once you have enough people, launch an app with per-category monitoring, total-price caps, and image-based item recognition.
- Data (updated daily) · Launched 2026-09-15 · UK rating 14 · 11-08 charted in 1 stores
iOS · best category chart rank · by store Data 2026-10-28 → 2026-11-08 (12 days, 12 observations). Lower rank is higher; gaps mean it wasn't charted that dayiOS · Ratings count · UK Data 2026-10-28 → 2026-11-08 (12 days, 12 observations). Apple doesn't publish download counts; rating growth is a proxy for downloads.
PING does just one thing: you set a price for each Pokémon card you want, including postage and buyer protection fees. It watches eBay and Vinted, and your phone buzzes as soon as someone lists below that price. It launched on iOS in 2026 Sep 15, and by Nov 6 it had only 14 ratings worldwide, yet it has stayed on the UK Shopping category's Top Grossing chart. It hasn't really broken out, but the approach is worth studying: first run a deal-alert Discord group, then build the app, then have a card-community creator push it. The same playbook could be rerun in another category or country.
A review from Oct 30
In 2026 Oct 30, a five-star review appeared on the UK App Store titled "Incredible app." The reviewer said they work and can't keep refreshing eBay, and watched a card sell to someone else at a price they would have paid, "which really stings." After nearly a month of use, they still missed one alert by £1:
I missed out on a ping by £1 and the owner felt bad so gave me a free month of pro because he felt bad😂
The shop owner felt bad and gave him a free month of Pro. That review roughly sums up PING: its users are working collectors afraid of losing good deals to others, and the owner is one person who runs the community and handles support himself.
The owner is Kane Sims-Wilson, a Brit, and this is the only app under his name on the App Store. The operating company, PINGTCG LTD, was registered with UK Companies House in 2026 Sep 4, based in Ely, Cambridgeshire. Eleven days later, the iOS version launched.
What it is
The website's hero section reads: "Set your target price. PING scans eBay 24 hours a day. When something lists under your budget, you get an instant alert on your phone." Using it takes three steps:
- Pick cards, set prices: choose from 800+ sets in English, Japanese, and Chinese, raw or graded cards, and set a maximum price per card. The site stresses the price is "all in," with postage and buyer protection included.
- What it monitors: it watches eBay auctions and Buy It Now listings, plus Vinted. The site says alerts pass "thirteen checks" before they're sent. If a listing has a wrong title or no card number, it reads the product photos to identify the card (AI image recognition).
- Push alerts in seconds: the site claims a median delay of about 18 seconds. Auction listings show a countdown, and listings where sellers accept offers are marked separately.
There's also a collection tracker: log the cards you own and see what percentage of a set you've completed, then set a one-tap alert for the missing ones. The official site's example reads "Pokémon 151,165 cards, 153 collected, next missing one is Zapdos ex, price cap £28".
Pricing is a free tier plus Pro: £4.99 a month, or £49.99 a year (UK App Store). The Oct 25 1.1.6 update notes say "the trial is only shown when the account is actually eligible for a free trial," suggesting the paywall sits at the trial step.
Why now
First, the Pokémon 30 anniversary. An eBay press release says that in 2026 July, "Pokémon" got 600 million+ searches on eBay.co.uk, and collectibles were the biggest source of eBay's Q2 sales growth. The September 30th Celebration set dropped, and many of the sales posted on the PING site are from that set: Sylveon ex 153/128 sold for £1.17 against a listed value of £60; Mew ex 152/128 sold for £61.16 against a value of £130.
Second, eBay's built-in tools are slow. eBay's saved searches send about one email a day, you have to write your own keywords, they don't factor postage into the price, and they don't identify cards from photos. In Sep 1, eBay UK launched an official trading card price guide, but it only tells you what a card is worth, not when new listings appear. One review put it bluntly: "always wanted something to stop me checking eBay constantly."
Third, the results are visible and the math is easy. Each win saves £10 to £70, and at £4.99 a month, users can see at a glance whether it's worth it.
Where users come from
The Discord group came before the app. In Oct 6, the UK card-collecting Instagram creator @theuk.pokeman (44.5k followers) posted a Reel marked #ad, opening with "I'm officially working with @ping.tcg" and including the line "They are not just a discord anymore." In other words, PING started as a Discord deal-hunting group. The successful-sale screenshots in the site's "What winning looks like" section come from the group's "wins" channel, and the button links straight to Discord. There's also a detail: on the day the iOS app launched (Sep 15), one review already said "I have been using this application for a while," meaning these users were already active before launch. As of Nov 6, the group had 217 members, with 40 online (per the Discord invite page).
One creator, two collaborations. In early September, @theuk.pokeman and @ping.tcg posted a joint post, and in Oct 6 the creator posted the paid Reel above.
Giveaway. From Oct 29 to Nov 9, the grand prize was a box of the 30th anniversary Elite Trainer Box (ETB) plus a one-year Pro subscription, with a one-year Pro for each of the 2rd to 5th place winners. To enter, you had to follow the account, tag three friends, repost the story, and sign up for a PING account. Open to the UK only, ages 18 and up.
Community-driven positive reviews. From Oct 20 to 30, a cluster of 5 long five-star reviews appeared on the App Store, some mentioning "Had this app recommended to me" and others "Great community." It looks like group members were encouraged to leave reviews, not fake reviews.
Self-promotion on Reddit. A post in r/PokemonTCG_UK titled "Ping. Instant alerts for Pokemon cards iOS and Android" exists, though its reach is unknown.
Channels with no results: no TikTok videos for it turned up, nobody mentioned it on X in the last 90 days, and there's no media coverage. Its Instagram has only about 420 followers.
How big it really is
Tiny.
| Metric | Metric | Sources |
|---|---|---|
| iOS ratings | 14 in total, all five-star; at 10-28 there were 11, and the count didn't rise for five days after 11-01 | App Store,11-06 |
| UK Shopping Top Grossing chart | From 10-28 to 11-06, in order: 31, 43, 14, 33, 57, 84, 54, 33, 32, 41 | App Store UK store |
| Android | 1,000+ downloads, 6 reviews | Google Play |
| Cumulative pushes | 520k alerts | PING's Instagram, self-described at end of October |
| Discord | 217 people | Discord,11-06 |
Chart rank here means little. On the same day, UK Shopping Top Grossing sat between #25 and #60 with Thrifted (0 ratings), WhatPrice (1 ratings) and QuickList (0 ratings) all in the mix. The category bar is low: a few subscriptions a day can put you in the top fifty. So PING's monthly revenue is probably only a few hundred pounds (estimate).
Who it's competing with
The TCG-alerts niche looks crowded, but most products do something else: retail restock alerts that help people snag new sealed boxes. PING does secondhand single-card deal hunting, aimed at collectors trying to complete a set.
| Product | What it does | Scale |
|---|---|---|
| Dropee | Restock alerts across hundreds of UK retailers | UK Shopping Top Grossing #3, 99 UK ratings |
| CCN | Release and restock intel | US 2,062 / UK 375 ratings |
| PokeNotify | US restock plus in-store sightings, $7.99/mo | US 796 ratings |
| Collectr | Collection tracking and valuation, doesn't push single new listings | US, about 69k ratings |
| CardboardSniper | US, web + email, leans toward graded cards, from $20/mo | Not disclosed |
| SlabPing | Graded cards only, auto-pushed to Discord, you can't pick cards | Free |
| PriceCharting | Emails when wishlisted cards drop below market price, $6/mo | Long-established |
| ListingAlarm, Flipify, uBuyFirst | Generic eBay keyword monitoring, no card-number awareness | Long-established tools |
Watches eBay UK and Vinted by card number, calculates total price, sends native mobile push. In the UK it's almost the only one doing this. A Reddit thread on r/PokemonDealsUK mentions a free eBay UK single-card alert tool with roughly the same features, but I couldn't find its name or launch date. The idea itself isn't new: the US already has web tools in many variations, and the technical bar is not high.
Dropee deserves a look: it targets the same UK card-collecting crowd as PING, charges £4.99 a month, and has already reached #3 on UK Shopping Top Grossing. This crowd will pay for alerts, and Dropee has already proven it.
What it actually does well
Broken down by feature, two things are worth copying.
It watches by card, not by keyword. Generic monitoring tools make you write your own keywords. PING uses a card table built on card numbers, language and grade, adds a total-price cap, and when a listing title is unclear it identifies the card from the photo. That card-literacy isn't in generic tools, and eBay's own features don't have it either. Reviews keep saying "actually works", and that's what they're praising.
The community came before the app. The Discord wins channel has people posting "bought for £1.17, market price £60" every day. Those screenshots are both community content and public proof, and they built the first batch of users. When the app launched, it didn't start from zero.
If it were you
My take: don't try to beat it in the UK Pokémon lane. Take the model of "deal-hunting community + alert app watching by catalog ID" to other collectible categories or other secondhand markets. It's worth testing, but expect modest revenue.
Who it suits: people who collect a specific category and already speak its jargon (card numbers, versions, grades); people who can build a stable scraper or connect to platform APIs; people willing to spend every day in the community.
Who it doesn't suit: people aiming for a big business; people unwilling to take on platform data-access risk; people who know nothing about the category and just want to copy a template. Users will spot that in seconds.
How to build it: pick one lane. Categories could be One Piece, Lorcana, sports cards, LEGO minifigures, figurines. Markets could be Mercari and Yahoo Auctions in Japan, Cardmarket and Kleinanzeigen in Germany, or eBay plus Facebook Marketplace in the US (the US has the most web tools, so it ranks last). Copy PING's skeleton: a category card table, a total-price cap per item, auctions and buy-it-now handled separately, photo identification as a fallback, collection progress, and one-tap alerts for missing cards. Copy the pricing too: free tier, plus a monthly or annual subscription, with the trial placed in front of the paywall.
How to get users: the first step isn't building the app. Open a group, post good deals to it manually or semi-automatically, and get members to share their completed purchases. Once you have a hundred or two hundred active people, launch the app and move the group over. Then work with a mid-tier creator in the category on a paid partnership, with a giveaway of physical goods plus an annual membership. Purchase screenshots become your ad creative.
When to move: the Pokémon 30 anniversary buzz probably lasts until the end of 2026. If you switch categories, time it to that category's major release. The one or two months after a release are when people most urgently need single cards.
Signs you've misread it: after two months the group doesn't post wins and members are inactive, which means the secondhand price gaps in that category aren't wide enough. Or eBay, Vinted or Mercari start rate-limiting or blocking your monitoring requests. Or the platform launches its own price-based real-time alerts.
Data as of 2026-11-06. PING's subscriber count and revenue aren't public; "a few hundred pounds a month" is inferred from the chart threshold. The 520k pushes and 18-second latency are PING's own claims.
Research notes: competitor table, acquisition evidence, full research report
- Competitors
Name Where Launched Scale How it differs from this one Dropee – Product Alerts iOS 2026-02 UK Shopping Top Grossing #3, 99 UK ratings Watch UK retailer restocks, skip secondhand single cards CCN: TCG & Collectible Alerts iOS 2022-03 US 2062 / UK 375 ratings, UK Shopping Top Grossing #6 Release and restock intel community, retail sniping PokeNotify iOS 2026-08 US 796 ratings, self-described 100k+ collectors US restock plus in-store sightings, $7.99/mo Snag: TCG Alerts iOS 2026-07 US 183 ratings Restock alerts, hard paywall at $9/mo Collectr iOS 2022-01 US, about 69k ratings Collection tracking and valuation, doesn't push individual new listings eBay saved searches + UK trading card price guide Big-company features Price guide 2026-09-01 All eBay users Saved-search emails roughly once a day, you hand-write keywords, no total-price calculation, no image recognition CardboardSniper Web 2026 Unknown, from $20/mo US, judges deals against sold prices for the same grade, email alerts, leans toward graded cards SlabPing Web 2026 Unknown, free Graded cards only, auto-pushed to Discord, you can't pick cards PriceCharting Collector Web Years $6/mo Emails when wishlisted cards drop below market price ListingAlarm / Flipify / uBuyFirst Web Years Generic tools Generic keyword monitoring, no awareness of card numbers, card tables or grades - Where users come from
- Verified Migration from its own Discord deal-hunting community: creator copy reads "They are not just a discord anymore"; the website's Wins section is entirely Discord members' purchase screenshots; supports Discord login; Discord 217 people
- Verified Instagram influencer partnership: @theuk.pokeman (44.5K followers)2026-10-06 posted a Reel saying "officially working with @ping.tcg" tagged #ad, with a co-branded post in September
- Verified Giveaway: running to end of October, 11-09 winners get a 30th-anniversary ETB plus 5 one-year Pro subscriptions; requires account sign-up, following 3 accounts, and reposting a story; UK only
- Verified Self-promotion on Reddit: r/PokemonTCG_UK post "Ping. Instant alerts for Pokemon cards iOS and Android"; engagement not captured
- Verified Win posts and community-driven reviews: Instagram and the website repeatedly show "£1.17 bought at market price £60"; between 10-20 and 10-30 a cluster of 5 long reviews mentions the community, one says the shop owner gave away a month of Pro
- Inferred TikTok, X, press, paid ads: TikHub and x-radar searches both returned 0; ad libraries don't track it
PING: TCG Card Finder & Alerts (ios_6793999894) research report
Research date 2026-11-06. App Store id 6793999894, developer KANE SIMS-WILSON (UK individual, operating entity PINGTCG LTD).
One line
A solo UK-developed Pokémon card secondhand single-card deal alert app: you set a "total price cap including postage and buyer protection fees" for each card you want, and PING watches eBay (auctions plus buy-it-now) and Vinted, pushing an alert when a new listing comes in under your cap. It didn't "break out"; it sits at #30–80 on the very low-bar UK Shopping Top Grossing chart. A small Discord community plus one or two Instagram creators brought in a few hundred to a thousand or two early users, a small fraction of whom subscribed to Pro at £4.99/mo.
Part 1: How big is it really?
- Ratings: #14 overall on iOS worldwide, average 5.0 (iTunes lookup, 2026-11-06). In our database it went from 2026-10-28 to 11-06 ratings and then had zero growth for 5 days after 11 to 14,11-01 (appstore.app_day). Only UK data is available.
- Top Grossing: UK Shopping category in-app purchase chart. From 10-28 to 11-06 the order is 31 / 43 / 14 / 33 / 57 / 84 / 54 / 33 / 32 / 41 (appstore.app_day). The bar for this chart is low: on the same day, Thrifted (0 ratings, #49), WhatPrice (1 ratings, #52) and QuickList (0 ratings, #54) were also in the UK Shopping top 25–60 (appstore.app_profile, cc=gb). So #41 probably only means a few subscriptions a day (speculation, unverified), roughly a few hundred pounds a month in revenue.
- Pricing: the App Store in-app purchases are PING Pro £4.99 (monthly) and £49.99 (yearly) (UK App Store page). The website FAQ, however, says it is "free during beta," so it is a free tier with a Pro upgrade. The 1.1.6 update notes say "the trial is only shown when the account can actually get a free trial," which shows the paywall sits at the trial step (App Store update notes).
- Android: com.pingtcg.app, 1000+ downloads, 6 reviews, 5.0 stars (AppBrain and Google Play pages). Our googleplay database does not cover it.
- Self-reported figures: an Instagram post says "520k notifications sent" (instagram.com/p/DfASyMMovzq, around late October); the website says "median push latency about 18 seconds" (pingtcg.com).
- Community size: Discord "PING" has 217 members, 40 online (Discord invite API, 2026-11-06); Instagram @ping.tcg has 418–425 followers and 46 posts; TikTok search for "pingtcg / ping tcg app" returns nothing; x-radar shows 0 mentions in the last 90 days.
II. Timeline
- 2026-09-01: eBay UK launches an official trading card price guide with card scanning (eBay press release). This is the platform itself adding "what is this card worth," not new-listing alerts, so it complements PING and is not a threat.
- 2026-09-04: PINGTCG LTD is registered with Companies House in the UK, company number 17439086, registered in Ely, Cambridgeshire.
- Around 2026-09-09: UK card-community Instagram creator @theuk.pokeman (44.5k followers) and @ping.tcg post a joint post (search snippet "September 9 · ping.tcg / theuk.pokeman").
- 2026-09-15: iOS launch.
- 2026-10-06: @theuk.pokeman posts a Reel "I'm officially working with @ping.tcg" tagged #ad, a paid partnership. The post says "They are not just a discord anymore, they now have a brand new product app" (Instagram search snippet), which shows PING started with a Discord deal-hunting group and built the app later.
- 2026-10-20 to 10-30: the App Store shows a cluster of 5 five-star long reviews, including "Had this app recommended to me," "Great community," and "The shop owner missed me by £1 on an order and gave me a month of Pro" (UK App Store reviews).
- 2026-10-25: v1.1.6.
- 2026-10-29 to 11-09: giveaway. The grand prize is a 30st-anniversary Pokémon Elite Trainer Box (ETB) plus one year of Pro; the 2nd–5rd places each get one year of Pro. Entry requires following, tagging 3 friends, reposting the story, and registering a PING account; UK only, 18+ (instagram.com/p/DfE9bI0iF0c).
III. Competitors
The "TCG alerts" niche is crowded, but most players do retail restock alerts (new product boxes arriving in stock), which is a different thing from the used single-card low-price listing alerts that PING does.
| Product | Where | Launched | Scale | How PING differs |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Dropee – Product Alerts | iOS / web (UK) | 2026-02 | #3 UK Shopping top grossing, 99 UK ratings (appstore library) | Watches restocks at hundreds of UK retailers, not used singles. The same UK TCG audience has already shown it will pay. |
| CCN: TCG & Collectible Alerts | iOS (UK company) | 2022-03 | US 2062 / UK 375 ratings, UK Shopping Top Grossing #6 | Release and restock intel community, retail sniping |
| PokeNotify | iOS / web | 2026-08 | US 796 ratings, self-described 100k+ collectors | US restock alerts plus store sightings, Trainer Pass subscription at $7.99/month |
| Snag: TCG Alerts | iOS | 2026-07 | US 183 ratings | Restock alerts, hard paywall at $9/mo |
| Collectr | iOS / Android | 2022 | About 69k US ratings, #9 US Shopping top grossing | Collection tracking and valuation, doesn't push individual new listings |
| eBay saved searches + UK price guide | Big-company features | Price guide 2026-09 | All eBay users | Saved-search emails arrive about once a day and keywords are entered by hand. No postage cap, no Japanese or Chinese card recognition, no image-based card ID. |
| CardboardSniper | Web | 2026 | Unknown, from $20/mo | US, eBay plus Fanatics. Judges whether a listing is a bargain by comparing with same-grade sale prices. Email alerts. Leans toward graded cards. |
| SlabPing | Web / Discord | 2026 | Unknown, free | Only graded cards. Automatically pushes to Discord when a listing is more than 20% below recent sales. Users cannot choose cards. |
| PriceCharting Collector | Web / App | Long-established | $6/mo | Emails when wishlisted cards drop below market price |
| ListingAlarm / Flipify / uBuyFirst | Web / desktop | Years | General eBay monitoring | Keyword monitoring. Does not understand card numbers, card lists or grading. |
| CardVex, TCGSniper | Discord / web | 2025–26 | Free | Discord alerts, leaning toward restocks and price drops |
| A free eBay UK single-card alert tool from r/PokemonDealsUK (name unverified) | Web / App | 2026 | Unknown | Almost the same features (pick a card, set a cap, eBay UK), and it advertises catching misspelled titles. Free. |
| General Vinted alerts (Vinotify, Flipify, flow-market) | iOS / web | 2025–26 | Vinotify is #58 in UK Shopping top grossing | General clothing-focused Vinted monitoring, no card knowledge |
Bottom line: a native app that monitors used singles on eBay and Vinted by card number, sets a total-price cap and pushes to your phone is something almost nobody does in the UK (apart from the free Reddit tool). But the concept isn't new: CardboardSniper, SlabPing, PriceCharting and ListingAlarm all have variants, so the barrier to entry is low.
4. Where users come from (growth levers)
- Its own Discord deal-hunting group (confirmed): the creator's caption says "not just a discord anymore." The website's "Wins" section is full of purchase screenshots shared by Discord members, such as a Sylveon ex bought for £1.17 against a market price of £60. The app supports Discord login, and its terms list Discord as a notification channel. Early users came over from the group.
- Paid partnership with an Instagram card creator (confirmed): @theuk.pokeman, 44.5k followers, whose 10-06 Reel is tagged #ad. A joint post was also published in September.
- Giveaway for acquisition (confirmed): an ETB plus one year of Pro as the prize, requiring account registration, tagging friends and reposting stories, UK only.
- Reddit self-promotion (confirmed, details not read): r/PokemonTCG_UK has a post "Ping. Instant alerts for Pokemon cards iOS and Android," and it also shows up in r/PokemonDeals' related recommendations. Reddit blocks scraping, so vote and comment counts are unknown.
- Content built around "deal wins" (confirmed): Instagram and the website repeatedly post "a member bought X for £X, market price £Y," using the money saved as the selling point.
- Founder handles support personally and offers compensation in exchange for reviews (evidence in reviews): one review mentions "owner gave a month of Pro." 5 long reviews cluster between 10-20 and 10-30, and the wording reads like community members (one mentions "great community"). Not a policy violation, but there are clear signs of community steering.
- Store search and ASO: the title was later changed to "TCG Card Finder & Alerts" (the old name "PING - TCG Alerts" still appears on the website), which is targeting keywords. Effect unknown.
- Not found: TikTok content, X discussion, press coverage, paid ads (TikTok and Meta ad libraries don't track it, so no results doesn't mean it isn't advertising).
V. Why it took off (at its scale)
- Real demand, and it's peaking: 2026 marks Pokémon's 30th anniversary. eBay's press release says that in 2026 July, "Pokémon" was searched 600 million times on eBay.co.uk, and collectibles were the biggest driver of eBay's Q2 GMV growth. The 30th Celebration set drops in September, and a lot of the cards on the official site's "Wins" page come from this set. Collectors chasing full sets have to watch single cards one by one, and eBay's saved-search emails arriving once a day are too slow. That's the user pain (a review in their own words: "stop me checking eBay constantly").
- Starting from a community that already trusted it: the Discord group came first, and deal wins were shared there every day, so App conversions came from people who already knew the brand. Reviews like "great community" and "customer support is great" confirm this.
- Product details done right: caps are calculated on the total price including postage and buyer protection fees; coverage spans 800+ sets in English, Japanese and Chinese; when a title is unrecognizable, AI reads the card image, which catches misspellings and vague titles; auctions and buy-it-now listings are handled separately; the watchlist tracks set completion and lets you set alerts for missing cards with one tap. These are "card-aware" capabilities that general eBay monitoring tools lack.
- People pay because the savings are visible: one deal saves £10–£70, so the £4.99/month Pro price is easy to justify, and users can tell at a glance whether it's worth it.
VI. Differentiation
- Versus restock tools (Dropee, CCN, PokeNotify, Snag): PING does not chase new retail releases. It hunts used singles, built for collectors completing sets, not resellers grabbing boxes.
- Versus general eBay monitors (ListingAlarm, Flipify, uBuyFirst): PING understands cards. It builds monitors from card numbers and card lists, supports Japanese and Chinese cards, uses AI to read images, judges against the cap using total price, and also monitors Vinted at the same time. Many people on UK Vinted are clearing out stock without knowing what they have, which is the main hunting ground.
- Versus eBay's own features: push is near real-time (claimed median 18 seconds), while eBay saved searches send one email a day.
- Versus US web tools (CardboardSniper, SlabPing): PING is a native mobile app focused on the UK (eBay UK plus Vinted), priced at £4.99/month in the way UK users expect.
- Are these differences the reason it took off? Partly. "Card-aware + UK + Vinted" let it hold a gap, and reviews praise it for actually working ("unlike other apps"). But its current numbers (14 ratings, a Discord of 217 people) come mainly from community migration and one creator. It hasn't really "taken off" yet. Anyone can copy the product shape; the real moat is monitoring speed and the accuracy of AI image recognition.
VII. Visibility and copycats
- Revenue is not public. There is no TrustMRR listing, and the founder hasn't been seen sharing revenue. No press coverage; 0 mentions on X. Instagram has just over 400 thousand followers and Discord has 217 members. It's still largely unknown.
- Copycats: none clearly copying PING has been seen. The "free eBay UK single-card alert" on r/PokemonDealsUK is almost identical in function, but the posting date and name are unverified, so it may not be a copy and may have been built independently around the same time.
8. What to take from it
- Playbook: build the Discord deal group first, the app second. The group shares wins every day and doubles as content, social proof and seed users. After the app launched, a vertical creator's #ad plus a physical giveaway (ETB plus one year of Pro) amplified it.
- Product: monitors by eBay category ID, not keywords (card number, language, grade), with price caps on total cost, and AI reads images as a fallback when titles are unclear. The approach can carry over to One Piece, Lorcana, sports cards, LEGO minifigures, and figures, and to Japan's Mercari / Yahoo Auctions or Germany's Cardmarket / Kleinanzeigen.
- Pricing: a free tier plus a Pro plan at £4.99/month or £49.99/year, with a free trial behind the paywall. The UK Shopping Top Grossing chart has a low bar, so a few subscriptions can get it charted and give it some exposure.
IX. Uncertainties
- Real paying users and MRR are not public. At that threshold, the revenue behind charts #14–84 could be only a few hundred pounds a month (estimate).
- We didn't get the in-app description of what separates Pro from free (alert limits, speed, Vinted, AI image recognition).
- We couldn't verify the Reddit post's engagement or posting time, or the name and size of r/PokemonDealsUK's similar tool, because Reddit blocks scraping.
- Whether it runs Meta / TikTok ads: our ad libraries don't track it, and we found no evidence.
- It depends on the eBay and Vinted data APIs (the terms say checks run on a schedule, not continuously). If it gets rate-limited or blocked, the product stops working.
Sources
- App Store UK page / iTunes lookup: apps.apple.com/gb/app/ping-tcg-alerts/id6793999894
- Our appstore library: app_day, app_profile (2026-10-28 to 11-06)
- Website: pingtcg.com/, terms: pingtcg.com/terms
- Companies House:find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/1…
- Instagram: www.instagram.com/ping.tcg/, www.instagram.com/reel/DeKRB8WswLf/, www.instagram.com/p/DfASyMMovzq/, www.instagram.com/p/DfE9bI0iF0c/
- Discord invite endpoint: discord.gg/fNZB6jgGsw
- Google Play / AppBrain:www.appbrain.com/app/ping-tcg-alerts/com.pingtcg.app
- Reddit (search snippets only): www.reddit.com/r/PokemonTCG_UK/comments/1vdeih9/, www.reddit.com/r/PokemonDealsUK/comments/1x6h62u/
- eBay UK price guide press release: www.ebayinc.com/stories/press-room/uk/ebay-launches-price-gu…
- Competitors: cardboardsniper.com/blog/best-ebay-card-deal-alert-tools, slabping.com/guides/pokemon-card-price-alerts, dropee.app/, www.pokenotify.com/, www.trackalacker.com/articles/news/pokenotify-vs-trackalacke…