Data Licensing
Last updated: August 4, 2026
This page explains what you can and can’t do with TCG API data, in plain English. It’s guidance, not a separate contract — the Terms of Service are the governing agreement for all standard plans. If anything here seems to conflict with the Terms, the Terms win.
The short version: use our data to power your product — don’t make our data the product.
Which plan do I need?
Section titled “Which plan do I need?”| What you’re building | Plan you need |
|---|---|
| Personal collection tracker, spreadsheet, private tool | Free, Hobby, or Starter |
| Hobby project or free community bot (no ads, sponsorships, or paid features) | Free, Hobby, or Starter |
| Development and testing before launch | Any plan — upgrade before you monetize |
| Anything that makes money: apps with ads, subscriptions, paid features, affiliate links | Pro or Business |
| Pricing your store’s inventory, internal business analytics | Pro or Business |
| High request volume, bulk endpoints at scale | Business |
| AI/ML model training (the model must not be able to reproduce or substitute for the dataset) | Business |
| Reselling our data, running a competing API or data feed, selling bulk exports | Not allowed on any plan |
Commercial use means the product or workflow that uses our data generates revenue in any form — directly (subscriptions, paid features) or indirectly (ads, sponsorships, driving sales for a store). Whether the data is publicly visible doesn’t matter; pricing your own inventory is commercial use.
The redistribution boundary
Section titled “The redistribution boundary”This is the one hard line, and it applies to every plan including Business:
- Don’t operate an API, feed, file dump, or export that serves our pricing data to third parties.
- Don’t sell or give away bulk datasets or database exports built from our data.
- Don’t offer public, unrestricted downloads of our records.
- Don’t act as a data broker or syndicator for our data.
The practical test: if someone could use your product instead of subscribing to TCG API in order to get the data, that’s not permitted. Everything else on this page describes what is.
What you can do
Section titled “What you can do”Cache and store server-side. You may cache API responses in your own database and serve your users from that cache during an active subscription. Keep cached prices reasonably fresh (refresh at least as often as your product claims the data is current), and keep the stored data inside your product — storage is fine, redistribution is not. When your subscription ends, see When you cancel.
Show prices in your app. Card-level and collection-level display of current values is exactly what the API is for, on any plan that matches your use case (see the table above).
Build derived metrics. Charts, trends, volatility scores, indices, confidence intervals, collection valuations, ROI estimates — analytics you compute from our data are yours, and you can keep displaying and iterating on them. The exception is a “thin disguise”: republishing our prices with trivial transformation (rounding, currency conversion, renaming fields) is still redistribution.
Run a private backend. Keeping your API key server-side and proxying data to your own app’s users is normal architecture, not redistribution. What crosses the line is a public endpoint that third parties can use as a data source.
Combine with other sources. You may mix our data with your own first-party data and other lawfully obtained sources. Keep provenance: retain our identifiers and timestamps so provider-sourced records stay separable (you’ll want this at cancellation anyway).
Attribution
Section titled “Attribution”Attribution is appreciated but not required, and it doesn’t change which plan you need. If you’d like to credit us, something like this works:
Pricing data via TCG API
Don’t state or imply that TCG API, TCGPlayer, or any game publisher endorses or is affiliated with your product.
Card images
Section titled “Card images”The API returns image URLs for cards. Card artwork is copyrighted by the respective game publishers — we do not and cannot grant you rights to the artwork itself. Displaying card images in your product is common industry practice, but it’s your responsibility to assess; you can build on our pricing data without displaying images at all.
When you cancel
Section titled “When you cancel”The data license is active-subscription-scoped. If you cancel or your account is terminated:
- Stop serving provider-sourced records to your users, and delete cached raw records (prices, history, catalog rows sourced from us) within 30 days.
- You keep everything that’s genuinely yours: your user accounts, first-party transactions, your own catalog mappings, your formulas, and derived analytics — as long as those derived outputs can’t be used to reconstruct our dataset.
What we are (and aren’t) promising
Section titled “What we are (and aren’t) promising”- Pricing data is sourced from publicly available marketplace data (primarily TCGPlayer, with Cardmarket as an EU supplement). We are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or partnered with TCGPlayer, Cardmarket, or any game publisher.
- Prices are estimates derived from public market activity. No accuracy, completeness, or uptime guarantee, and no SLA — see the Terms of Service for warranties and liability. Don’t make our data the sole basis for financial decisions.
- We don’t provide indemnification or legal opinions about your product.
- Field definitions (market price, listing counts, sales volume, history windows) are documented in the API reference and llms-full.txt.
Custom agreements
Section titled “Custom agreements”Standard plans are governed by the Terms of Service — no signature or per-account license confirmation is needed or offered. If your organization requires a bespoke agreement (procurement, redlines, custom terms), that’s outside standard plans; email [email protected] to discuss an enterprise arrangement.
Not sure?
Section titled “Not sure?”If your use case isn’t clearly covered here, email [email protected] before you build. A two-line description of what you’re making is usually enough for a definitive answer.