Every price Scout shows is an ask — a price a seller is currently asking on a live marketplace. Nobody has necessarily paid it. That's a deliberate choice: asks are what you'll actually face on a shop floor, where the tag on the shelf is also an ask. But it means you need to read the numbers the right way.
The three levels of a price read
Item quote. When the scan matches a tracked item, you get the current asking range for that exact thing: median ask, low ask, and how many live listings sit behind the number. More listings, tighter spread — that's a read you can lean on.
Category band. When nothing tracked matches your exact item, Scout falls back to the spread of asks across the whole category and says so, in plain words: a category band, not this item's price. A band tells you what the neighborhood looks like. It cannot tell you what your exact copy is worth, and we won't pretend it does.
No read. Sometimes the honest answer is nothing. When the data isn't there, Scout says the data is limited and tells you to verify externally instead of printing a number we made up. If you ever see a confident price on a genuinely obscure item in any app, ask where it came from.
Sold comps are a different tool
Asking prices and sold prices answer different questions. Asks tell you what the room wants today; sold comps tell you what someone actually paid. For anything expensive — a graded rookie, a sealed first-print, a high-end comic — check sold listings on the marketplace and the grader's own population and auction records before you commit. Scout gets you to the negotiation informed; it doesn't replace the comp check on a four-figure buy.
The confidence labels are part of the price
Every read carries its context: how many listings, when it was captured, which source. A median built from forty listings read this morning is a different animal from one built from three listings read last month, and the app shows you which one you're holding. Read the label before you read the number.
What the Heat Index adds
The category's heat score tells you the direction of the whole market — heating, steady, cooling, or calibrating when there isn't enough data to say. Buying into a heating category and buying into a cooling one are different risks at the same price. The score is a signal about the room, never a promise about your item.
