Why I built Too Many Comics
A personal problem, solved the way a software developer solves things, then shared.
I have too many comics. Literally thousands of them: bagged, boarded, and well cared for, but in a state of, let's call it, disorganization. For years I struggled with the three questions every collector knows by heart: what exactly do I have, where is it, and what is it worth?
So I looked for a comic book inventory app. What I found either didn't do what I wanted, or did some of it, for a price. And I like free.
I'm a software developer by trade. So I did what developers do when the tool they want doesn't exist: I built it, around three requirements that never changed.
My entire inventory, on my phone, at any size. Not a one-time cataloging project that goes stale in a month, but an inventory that's easy to keep RIGHT. Books move between boxes. Boxes move between shelves. Disorganization always wants to creep back in, so fixing a record has to be as easy as making one.
AI does the tedious part. Point the camera, talk, and let the AI recognize each book, assess its condition, and put a ballpark value on it. Grading thousands of books by hand is the reason collections stay disorganized in the first place.
Selling has to be easy. A collection this size isn't static. When it's time to let some books go, the inventory should hand me the listing, not make me retype what it already knows.
Too Many Comics is that app. It turned out that building it for one collector with too many comics made it useful to every collector with too many comics. Which, if we're honest, is all of us.
The free part
The app is free, and cataloging your collection is free. The AI features that cost real money to run (recognition, grading, pricing) work on credits, with a weekly free allowance that covers casual collecting, because a tool built by someone who likes free shouldn't nickel-and-dime the people it was built for. Credits are there for the big weekends, not the everyday.
Who's behind it
Too Many Comics is a BigBrainCorp product. We build software tools that take complex, time-consuming problems and make them simple, then make them even simpler by putting AI to work on your behalf. OSSScan does it for software teams; Too Many Comics does it for collectors, dealers, and small comic shops.