Most serious sports memorabilia collectors eventually run into the same problem: buying and collecting is the fun part. Keeping track of everything isn’t.
A signed jersey might be hanging on the wall, while its certificate of authenticity is buried in a filing cabinet. Purchase receipts are sitting in an email inbox. Photos are scattered across a phone, and the spreadsheet that was supposed to keep everything organized hasn’t been updated in months.
For someone with five or ten collectibles, that’s manageable. Once a collection reaches 50, 100, or several hundred pieces, it becomes a real problem.
Relic Roster was built for exactly that situation.
The web-based platform gives sports memorabilia collectors one place to catalog their collections, keep authentication and provenance records, research recent eBay sales, track values, and create collection reports. It also uses AI to take some of the work out of adding new items.
Unlike many collection apps that are primarily built around trading cards, Relic Roster puts sports memorabilia front and center. Signed jerseys, helmets, bats, sticks, pucks, balls, autographed photos, game-used equipment, tickets, and other collectibles can all be tracked alongside sports cards.
Relic Roster was created by Scott Hicks, a Canadian collector who has been in the hobby for more than 30 years.
Hicks had been using the same mix of tools familiar to a lot of longtime collectors: spreadsheets for inventory, photos on his phone, separate authentication records, and repeated eBay searches whenever he wanted to get an idea of what something was worth.
Eventually, he decided to build what he couldn’t find elsewhere.
The result is a platform focused on some pretty basic questions that become surprisingly difficult to answer as a collection grows: What do I own? What did I pay for it? Where did I get it? Do I have the authentication paperwork? And what are similar items selling for today?
Adding Items With AI
Building a digital inventory from scratch can be tedious, especially if you’ve been collecting for years.
Relic Roster speeds things up with an AI-assisted scanner. Take a photo of a piece of memorabilia or a sports card and the platform attempts to identify details such as the player, team, year, and item type.
You review the information before adding it to your collection, so you’re not stuck with whatever the scanner comes up with.
For graded cards, Relic Roster can also recognize slabs from grading companies including PSA, BGS, and SGC and capture available grading information.
Collectors who already have their inventory in a spreadsheet don’t have to start over. Existing collections can be imported using CSV, and items can always be entered manually.
Checking What Your Collection Is Worth
Valuing sports memorabilia isn’t particularly straightforward.
Cards often have plenty of recent sales to compare. Memorabilia can be much harder. The value of two similar-looking autographed jerseys, for example, can change considerably depending on authentication, condition, the jersey itself, and even the quality or placement of the signature.
Relic Roster uses recent eBay sold listings to give collectors a starting point.
Instead of looking at what sellers are currently asking, collectors can review comparable items that have actually sold and use those sales to help decide what value to record for their own item.
Recorded values feed into the collection dashboard, giving the owner a running estimate of the value of the collection.
Relic Roster isn’t an appraisal service, and the values shouldn’t be treated as professional appraisals. For rare or particularly expensive pieces, a qualified appraiser may still be necessary.
What it does eliminate is the need to start a new eBay search every time you want to check the market for something you own.
Keeping the Paperwork with the Memorabilia
Authentication paperwork has a habit of becoming separated from the item it belongs to.
That’s inconvenient when you’re trying to sell something and potentially much more serious if you’re documenting a loss for insurance.
Relic Roster lets collectors keep those records attached to the item’s digital profile.
A record can include authentication information from companies such as JSA and Beckett Authentication Services, grading information for cards, purchase details, condition notes, ownership history, provenance, storage location, photographs, receipts, and other supporting documentation.
This may be one of the more useful parts of the platform for longtime collectors.
The memorabilia itself might change locations over the years, but its history doesn’t have to disappear with it.
Collection and Insurance Reports
Relic Roster can also turn the information stored in a collection into organized reports.
Rather than trying to create an inventory after something has been lost, stolen, or damaged, collectors can maintain the record as they go. Photos, descriptions, authentication information, and recorded values are already connected to the items.
Reports can then be used when documenting a collection for an insurance broker or provider.
Insurance companies have their own requirements, so these reports don’t replace an appraisal or guarantee that an insurer will accept a particular valuation. They do give collectors a much better starting point than a spreadsheet with a few item names and prices.
Anyone with a collection worth a significant amount of money will probably understand the appeal.
Seeing the Whole Collection
The dashboard is where all of this information comes together.
Collectors can see their recorded portfolio value, browse their items, and organize the collection using information such as sport, player, and item type.
They can also create collections around whatever makes sense to them: a particular player, team, era, set, sport, or part of the collection.
For a collector with memorabilia stored in several rooms, boxes, display cases, or even different locations, being able to pull up the entire collection from a phone or computer is useful on its own.
What Using Relic Roster Looks Like
Say you have 75 collectibles.
There are signed jerseys and photos, a few game-used pieces, some graded cards, and several authenticated autographs you’ve picked up over the years.
Maybe half of it is in a spreadsheet. Some of the newer purchases aren’t. The COAs are stored separately, and you haven’t checked the value of most of the collection in a year.
With Relic Roster, you could import the spreadsheet first rather than entering everything again. Items that aren’t in the spreadsheet can be photographed and added with the scanner.
From there, you can add authentication details, receipts, purchase prices, storage locations, and other information you want to keep with each item.
For pieces you want to revalue, you can check recent eBay sales and update the recorded value.
You don’t have to do the entire collection in one afternoon. The point is that once an item is in the system, you have somewhere to keep its information up to date.
Relic Roster Pricing
Relic Roster currently has three plans.
Free: Up to 10 items, 5 AI scans per month, 5 market comp searches, and basic CSV export. No credit card is required.
Pro – $9.99/month: Built for larger collections, with support for up to 100 items, 100 AI scans, additional market comp features, portfolio tracking, and CSV import and export.
Elite – $19.99/month: Intended for serious collectors and larger inventories, with unlimited items and AI scans (subject to fair-use limits), expanded market comp access, advanced reporting, insurance-focused features, and priority processing.
The free plan is enough to get a feel for how the scanner and collection management work without committing to a subscription.
Who Is Relic Roster For?
Someone with six pucks probably doesn’t need a dedicated collection management platform.
Someone with 150 pieces of sports memorabilia might feel differently.
Relic Roster makes the most sense once a collection becomes large or valuable enough that keeping accurate records starts to matter. It’s particularly relevant for people who collect authenticated autographs, signed jerseys, game-used equipment, graded cards, or other pieces where documentation can affect value.
There’s also something to be said for simply knowing what you own.
Collectors can spend decades building a collection, but the records surrounding it are often an afterthought. Receipts disappear. Values change. COAs get misplaced. Details about where something came from are forgotten.
Relic Roster gives that information somewhere to live.
It won’t replace the fun part of collecting, and that’s probably the point. It handles more of the boring part.
More information is available at RelicRoster.com.
