Company
PackFresh, LLC
An independent software company building products and infrastructure around the collectibles hobby: tools for the people who collect, play, and sell, and the shared systems underneath them.
Why PackFresh exists
The same problem, from four directions
A collector keeps a spreadsheet because no two apps agree on what they own. A player builds a deck in one place and owns the cards in another. A shop sells a card at the counter and spends Sunday making four systems agree it is gone. A developer who wants to build something for the hobby starts by scraping.
Those look like four different complaints. They are one: there is no shared, reliable answer to what a card is, who has it, and what it is worth. Everyone rebuilds that answer, badly, on their own. PackFresh builds it once and puts every product on top of it.
Built from inside the hobby
Tony Burian
Tony Burian · Founder, PackFresh
I have spent 26 years in the games industry: building games, and then building the software underneath the places games get bought, sold and talked about. Before PackFresh I was Head of Technology at TCGplayer. I have been a collector the entire time.
The through line is less flattering than a mission statement. I kept meeting the same problem from different sides. As a collector, keeping track of what I owned meant a spreadsheet that was wrong by Tuesday. As a player, the cards for a deck lived in one place and the record of what I owned lived in another. As an engineer, every system that touched a card had its own idea of what that card was, and reconciling them was somebody's whole job. Running technology for a marketplace, I watched exactly how expensive that gets at scale.
That is the honest reason PackFresh is this wide, and it is not a portfolio strategy. It is one person who is unusually interested in catalogs, taxonomy and the shape of data, building the things he kept wishing existed and then noticing they all needed the same foundation underneath. Seven tools, one engine.
I live with my wife and kids, and a collection that is now, finally, cataloged correctly.
What we are building
Eight products on one foundation
A marketplace and collection for people who collect and play, a deck builder, a scanner, a retail bot, a system for running a shop, and the platform the rest of them run on. They share one catalog, one record of what you own, one set of prices and one reputation.
That sharing is the whole point, and it is why the list is longer than a company this size would normally justify. Each product is useful by itself. Each one gets better when another is used, because they are reading and writing the same records rather than keeping copies. How they fit together, and the systems underneath.
Where we are today
Founder-led, and early
PackFresh is founder-led. Tony is the person building it, and the person you would be talking to.
Two of the 8 products are in beta and 5 are still being built. None of them is being described here as further along than it is: every product carries its real status and a sentence saying what that status means. The catalog underneath is the part that is genuinely finished, and it is public and countable.
Saying this plainly costs less than being found out. The products already say building when they are building, and the security page already lists what we do not have. The company description should hold to the same standard.
Elsewhere
The rest of it
- Why we started thisThe problems that made a company necessary, and what we think the answer is.
- How we workDecisions get written down before they get built, and the record outlives whoever made it.
- CareersOpen roles, and the actual philosophy behind each one.
- Trust and safetyWhat we hold, what we deliberately do not, and how to report a problem.
- ChangelogWhat we shipped and what we decided, dated.
- NewsroomBoilerplate, numbers you can cite, and someone to ask.
- BrandHow to write our name, and the colors that go with it.
- ContactFive addresses, so your message reaches someone who can answer it.