A year ago today, MyCoinage came out from behind the coming-soon curtain. I want to mark the occasion properly — not with a victory lap, but by being honest about what the last twelve months have actually looked like, what got built, what got broken, and where we go from here.
If you've been with us from the start, thank you. If you're new, hopefully this gives you a sense of what the project is and why I keep building it. Either way, it's been the most fun year of work I've had in a long time.
The starting point
This time last year, MyCoinage was a half-finished side project running on a single VPS, with about 1,800 coins in the catalogue, no realised-price data worth speaking of, and a coming-soon page that I genuinely wasn't sure when I'd be able to take down. I'd been working on it nights and weekends for months, mostly in the gaps around the day job, and it had reached the awkward stage where it was too built to abandon and too unfinished to launch.
I took it live in May 2026 because I was tired of saying "soon" to people who'd asked when the site would be up. The version that launched was rough — the coin catalogue worked but the price tracking was sparse, the leaderboard didn't exist, and half the guides I'd planned were still in draft. But it was usable, and "usable" turned out to be the right bar.
What got shipped
In rough chronological order, the year-one feature list:
- The coin catalogue. Started at around 1,800 entries; today it's well over 4,500. Every coin has a dedicated page with realised auction data feeding in from eBay UK, Spink, Baldwin's, Noonans, NumisBids, CoinCabinet, and Heritage. The pricing pipeline ingests new sales every day.
- The guides library. I had maybe twenty guides at launch. Today there are around 150, covering everything from the Atlantic Salmon 50p to how to grade a coin to the Charles III coin guide. Each one is fact-checked against realised auction sales before publication. The full library is at /guides.
- User collections. You can track what you own, see total value, watch portfolio movement over time, and compare your collection against others on the leaderboard.
- The leaderboard. Aggregate user collection values across the platform, refreshed daily. It's become one of the most-visited pages on the site, which surprised me — I built it as an afterthought.
- The auction price tracker. The single feature that drives most of what makes MyCoinage useful. Every coin's price chart is built from actual realised sales, not asking prices, not estimates, not dealer markups.
- Pro subscriptions. Soft-launched mid-year. Pro unlocks the higher collection limits, full access to the price detail data, and various analyst tools. Roughly 7 days free, then £2.99 a month or £28.99 a year.
- The mobile experience. Half the work this year was making the site genuinely usable on phones, where a meaningful chunk of traffic actually comes from. The bottom nav, the responsive coin pages, the touch-friendly collection editor — all of it iterated heavily over the year.
- The flair badges. A small thing but a fun one. Founders, contributors, and longtime members get distinct badges on their profiles and posts.
There's a longer list buried in the changelog, but those are the big ones.
Top traffic pages
Some of these have surprised me. The pages that have driven the most traffic this year, roughly:
- The various rare 50p guides — particularly the rare 50p coins guide, Kew Gardens 50p, and the is my 50p rare decision tool.
- Sovereign-related material — the sovereign values guide, how to spot a fake sovereign, and the various reign-by-reign sovereign breakdowns.
- The coin value checker page — natural search demand around "what is my coin worth" is enormous.
- The home page — surprisingly competitive, given how many people land directly on a guide via search.
- The error coin pages — 2008 undated 20p, 1983 New Pence 2p, and the UK coin errors list.
What I learned from the traffic data is that people overwhelmingly come to MyCoinage with one of two questions: "what is this coin worth?" and "is the one in my hand the rare version?" Almost everything else flows from there.
The community
This part I genuinely didn't expect. The user community has been kinder, more knowledgeable, and more engaged than I had any right to hope for. Things that have happened over the year:
- Corrections that made the catalogue better. A handful of the coin pages had errors (wrong mintage, miscredited designer, missing variant) that got flagged within days of launch by users who knew the material better than I did. Every one of those corrections improved the site.
- The Discord and feedback channels. Pre-launch I'd assumed I'd be the only person actively engaging with users. Within a couple of months, regulars were answering each other's questions before I got there. That community texture is what makes hobby sites actually fun.
- User-submitted coins. A meaningful chunk of the post-launch catalogue growth came from collectors flagging coins we hadn't yet added. Particularly Channel Islands, Isle of Man, and Northern Irish material that gets overlooked by the bigger UK databases.
Big thank-you to everyone who has emailed, posted, corrected, or just stuck around. The editor's page lays out my philosophy on how this should work — the community part is the most important bit.
Things that broke
In the interest of honesty:
- The first three months had a lot of pricing data noise. Some of the early scrapers were too generous about what counted as a realised sale. I had to add a manual verification layer halfway through year one and re-run a chunk of the data. The current pipeline only counts confirmed hammers and confirmed sold-listing prices.
- One memorable evening in autumn the database fell over for about ninety minutes during a peak traffic window. Root cause: a poorly-tuned query in the leaderboard refresh job. Fixed, monitored, learned from.
- A few guides got rewritten substantially after I realised the original versions were too dealer-influenced in their pricing claims. The current guides are tighter and stick closer to what verified auction data actually shows.
- The mobile coin page took three full rewrites before it stopped feeling cramped. I'm still not 100% happy with it.
I've tried to be conservative about claiming features work until they actually work. The site has grown by being honest about its limits.
What's coming in year two
A short list, deliberately not over-promising:
- More guides. Currently rolling out at one or two a week. The goal is full coverage of every notable UK series and denomination by the end of year two.
- Better portfolio analytics. The Pro tier will get a meaningful upgrade in mid-year — gain/loss tracking, basis cost handling, performance attribution by coin type.
- Deeper auction data integration. More auction houses, more price-discovery, faster ingest. The aim is for every realised UK coin sale across the major houses to land in the database within 48 hours.
- A proper iOS and Android app. This is the big one. The mobile web experience is acceptable; a native app could be excellent. No date yet.
- More content for non-UK collections. US and Commonwealth coverage is currently thin. Year two starts to fill that out.
- A few things I'm not ready to talk about. If they ship, you'll hear about them. If they don't, you won't, and that's how it should be.
Personal note
A year ago I wasn't sure this project was going to work. I don't think it's "made it" yet — there's an enormous amount still to build, and the genuinely successful version of MyCoinage is many years away. But the last twelve months have given me the conviction that it can work. The data is good, the community is real, the use cases are concrete.
Thanks for being part of year one.
Onward to year two.
— Connor
MyCoinage tracks every UK coin's realised auction prices. Browse the catalogue or start a free collection.