What could I get for this is a question about things, so it deserves an answer about things. A price tells you what a reseller might hand over. A band tells you where your item sits on one shared scale, so you can see at a glance which other items would be a fair trade for it. You can check yours in a browser, with no account.
Stand in a loft holding something you have finished with and the question arrives on its own. It is almost never "what is the market rate". It is "what could I get for this?"
That is a request for an idea, not a figure. And it turns out to be the more useful question of the two.
Why "what is it worth" answers something else
Plenty of sites will give you a number. Type in a games console or a record and one appears, confidently stated, usually beside an offer to buy the thing from you.
That number answers a narrow question: what you might receive if you sold the item to someone whose job is to resell it, once you have found them, photographed it and posted it.
It leaves out the thing you wanted to know, which is what you could have instead. The moment you are thinking about swapping, a price gets in the way, because a swap is not a comparison between an object and some money. It is a comparison between an object and another object.
Those are two different questions and they deserve two different answers.
How a band works
Everything on this site sits in a band. A band is a rough position on one shared scale, and it is the only thing anyone sees. There are twelve rungs.
That sounds like less information than a price. In practice it does more, for three reasons.
A band stays honest about doubt
When the evidence is thin, the band gets wider rather than narrower. You will see a span of rungs instead of one. That is the system saying it is unsure, in the clearest way it can.
A single figure would hide the same doubt behind a decimal point. We would rather be vague out loud than precise and wrong.
One scale covers every category
A band has no idea what category a thing is in. It only knows roughly where the thing sits. So a tub of bricks, a guitar, a bread maker and a box of hardbacks can all land on the same rung, and you can see immediately that any of them is a sensible trade for the others.
A price gives you that too, in theory, but you have to do the arithmetic yourself across four different listing sites. A band does it in one glance. That is most of what the browse page is for.
A band shortens the argument
Two people trying to agree what a used thing is worth in pounds is how most private swaps fall apart. Someone feels short-changed and the thread goes quiet.
Two people looking at a shared meter that says "these are about even" are having a much shorter conversation. Neither of them set the number, which is the point. Value here is worked out by the platform, and the meter is deliberately neutral — telling one side they did well would be telling the other side they did badly.
Price and band, side by side
| A price | A band | |
|---|---|---|
| Answers | What a buyer might pay | Which items trade evenly with yours |
| When evidence is thin | Looks just as confident | Widens, visibly |
| Comparing across categories | You do the sums | Same scale for everything |
| Who sets it | A buyer, or you | Worked out from several sources |
| What it invites | An offer of cash | An offer of goods |
Where a band comes from
A band is not a guess and it is not your opinion. Five things feed it, each carrying a different amount of weight:
- Settled second-hand values for the canonical product, where we hold them. This is the strongest source.
- What the thing cost new, aged by a curve for its category. A phone and a hand drill lose value at very different speeds, so each category carries its own curve.
- Real completed swaps. When two people trade and both confirm receipt, that is evidence about relative value, and it moves the whole scale a little. This is the part that gets better the longer the site runs.
- What a seller says it cost new. Capped low on purpose, because the person stating it has an obvious interest. It is labelled as seller-stated on the item page, and it is often the only source a coat or a garden tool will ever get.
- How much demand there is for that kind of thing right now.
Two guards matter here. A seller's own figure can never outweigh something we checked. And a swap where either side's band rests only on its owner's claim teaches the model nothing at all — two people agreeing with each other's guesses says nothing about the world.
Trying it on something you own
There is a tool on the site called the swap checker. It needs no account and no sign-up, and it works whether or not the marketplace has anything in it today. Describe the thing in plain words and it shows you where it sits.
It is most useful before you list anything, because it answers the question that decides whether you bother at all: is my thing on roughly the same rung as the thing I want?
- Same rung. You have a swap worth trying. List it.
- One rung apart. Add a small second item and the trade balances.
- Several rungs apart. Better to want something else, or to bundle more of what you own.
The only thing that leaves your browser is what you type in the first box. It is logged as the words and a timestamp, with nothing attached to you, so we can see which products people keep asking about. The field says so underneath it, and the privacy page spells it out.
A worked example
Say you have a road bike you stopped riding, and you would like a decent set of power tools.
You describe the bike in the checker and it lands mid-scale, as a single rung rather than a span, because bikes are well covered. You search for tools and the good combination kits sit one rung above. Instead of giving up, you add the bike rack that has been in the garage since the bike stopped going anywhere. The pair now matches the kit.
That is the whole shape of it: check, then adjust what you offer, rather than haggling over a figure that neither of you set. Comparing two sides of a trade is what the compare page exists for.
The limits, stated plainly
No figure appears anywhere. Not on a listing, not in an email, not on an item page. Nothing on this site is bought or sold, and the band is the only measure anyone sees.
Value is worked out rather than declared. You can say what something cost when it was new and that genuinely helps. What it is worth today is computed, because otherwise everyone's things would be worth exactly what they claimed.
Photos go unchecked against titles. Somebody can describe one thing and send another. Nothing settles until both people confirm that what arrived is what was promised, and each side posts or hands over their own. That confirmation is the protection that actually exists, and we would rather describe it accurately than promise more.
Trades run between two people. You give to one person and that person gives to you. A round where you give to Anna, Anna gives to Ben and Ben gives to you is a different mechanism, and the code refuses to build one. Our reasons are in why we skip math trades.
Thin categories stay thin. Clothes, shoes, garden tools and pet things often have one source and one only, so expect a wide band there. Books, games consoles, bikes and bricks are on much firmer ground.
Questions people ask
What a wide band tells you
That the evidence is thin, usually because the product is unusual or because the only thing behind it is what its owner said it cost new. Add a second item to the trade and the overall picture firms up.
Can I see what someone paid for an item?
No, and neither can we show you. There is no balance, no credit and no currency anywhere in the system. Gaps close with a small extra item or the trade goes ahead as it is. More on that in swapping without money.
Does the band change over time?
Yes. Every completed swap nudges the scale, and listings are revalued as that happens. A listing you take down and put back up is valued again on the way in, so it cannot sit frozen on an old rung.
The short version
"What is it worth" has a hundred answers online and every one of them ends with someone offering to buy your thing.
"What could I get for this" has almost none, and it is the question you were actually asking. A band answers it better than a price can, because it speaks in the only unit a swap can use: other things.
Go and try it on whatever you were thinking about while you read this.