ironetic is thrilled to announce the launch of Grādrz™, our new Software-as-a-Service platform for crowd-sourced grading of collectibles. Grādrz™ operates under the belief that “Experts are Everywhere” and that anyone is qualified to offer an opinion on the quality and condition of a collectible.

This platform was 3 years in the making and its launch was delayed time and again. The path to release was fraught with challenges… technical, time-based and financial. How fantastic was it to imagine launching an enterprise-grade SaaS platform as a tiny LLC without investor capital? It helps that I’m a technical founder, but the scope of this project was enormous. I hand-coded everything myself in the early days with some design assistance from Jai. I had the architecture, the deployments, database schemas, market knowledge and technical skills to do it all, but I could never seem to get all the services up & running fast enough. By the time I got done with one piece, another component completed months before was already obsolete and broken.

Enter: The age of Copilot! With AI-based coding tools, I was able to amplify my output exponentially in order to finally make this project a reality. The resulting application is my vision, my architecture, my choice of libraries and frameworks plus a heavy dose of Jai’s design skills. To build out every service and API in this thing was just too overwhelming to do alone. Leveraging Copilot to automate smaller tasks was like having an entire team of engineers working under my lead, just like in the old days.

Grādrz™ was my original inspiration for starting ironetic in the first place. It is a dream come true for me to launch this platform. As a lifelong comic book collector, I am deeply familiar with the process of professional comic book grading services. For my entire childhood, however, comics were graded “raw” by collectors and dealers. Back then, we didn’t need a referee telling us what was good and what was bad. We had our eyes, our experience and our own judgment. Can AI use computer vision to grade my comic according to machine learning training models of existing, established grades? Undoubtedly it can, but that is not what Grādrz™ is about.

Grādrz™ is about throwing rotten tomatoes at a movie screen. It’s about hopping in a stranger’s car to catch a ride without a licensed taxi. It’s an open, honest, online review of your item’s grade, averaged out across as many collectors as ever venture to adopt the platform. Currently, that’s only a handful since last Friday’s launch, but more will come. I am certain of it. I don’t yet know how far this will go, or which collectors will find it and use it first. There are many niche collector markets out there.

The platform is now open to the public in its alpha state. Free BonBonz are being credited to all new sign-ups to try out the system, so if you have collectibles that you want to put up to receive Grādz, go ahead and give it a try!