About Flipz
Built by resellers who wanted to make money — and beat each other doing it.
Flipz started as a spreadsheet for one person’s sourcing runs. It became a shared app the day two people compared numbers and one of them was lying. The spreadsheet’s best column — what things actually sold for — turned out to be the whole product.
The origin
It started on an island, where the national comps were wrong.
“A platform sales export proves what something sold for. It never contains what the seller paid.”The one idea the whole thing rests on
Flipz was first built on Oʻahu, where a couch that's worthless on the mainland sells for real money because freight makes new ones expensive, and where every summer a wave of families ships out and dumps a household. National price guides didn't describe that market. Neither did anyone's memory — resellers priced by gut, and everyone's gut was generous about their own wins.
The first tool was a private calculator: put in what something sells for, get back the most you can pay and still clear your target return. It's still here — it's the Flip Desk. But the interesting problem was upstream. Where does “what it sells for” come from, and why should anyone believe it?
The answer was hiding in a file every reseller already has. Your platform's sales report is generated by eBay or Mercari, not by you. It proves the sale. It can't prove your profit, because the platform never knew your cost. So sale prices are evidence and profit is a claim — and a tool built on that distinction can rank people on something they can't inflate. That's Flipz.
The islands turned out to be the sharpest example of a general pattern, not the whole market. Rural regions, base towns, anywhere freight or population churn bends prices away from the national average — the tool now works wherever you sell, and the region is just a filter.
What we won't do
Design rules, and the thing each one refuses.
Most reseller tools are built to be opened often. Flipz is built to be right. Those pull in different directions, and when they conflict, this is how we choose.
Evidence over claims
Imported sales are the only thing that ranks.
Typed numbers are labelled, kept, and useful for conversation — and worth exactly nothing on the leaderboard or in market data.
Refused: a board where the loudest poster wins on $0.
Show the working
Every estimate lists the comps behind it.
Match, age and weight for each one. A range instead of a point. Confidence that multiplies its factors, so agreement can't paper over thin evidence.
Refused: “our AI says $112.” That's what we're positioning against.
Weekly, not daily
Streaks count weeks of sourcing.
Sourcing isn't a daily activity. A daily streak on an app you have no daily reason to open manufactures guilt and breaks in week two.
Refused: a notification a day so people “check constantly.”
Free means free
The Solo tier is the complete tool for one person.
Paid is for other people's data and other people's seats. A free tier that nags teaches people the product isn't worth paying for.
Refused: fourteen-day trials dressed up as a free plan.
Private stays private
Your cost basis never enters the shared app.
The Flip Desk is a separate tool on purpose. Anything posted in Flipz is visible to the crew, and we say so rather than implying privacy the architecture can't deliver.
Refused: “private” groups that are really just a filter.
Never touch card data
When billing arrives, Stripe hosts the form.
There is no card-entry form on this site, not even a mock. Keys and secrets live on the server, never in a page anyone can open.
Refused: display ads — about $25 a month at realistic traffic, and they make a tool feel cheap.
How it got here
Two weeks from a calculator to a live database.
Late August 2026
The Flip Desk and the first Flipz
A private calculator with correct fee math for every platform, and a shared app — leaderboard, feed, crew board, trade board, market splits. Both self-contained pages; both fully tested. The idea about evidence and claims is written down for the first time.
29 August
The valuation engine and the scanner
Similarity-weighted quantiles over every verified sale, rarity-weighted word matching, a 90-day half-life, and a confidence score whose factors multiply. Paste a page of listings and every one gets priced against it.
1 September
Live eBay listings, and the islands-only framing dropped
A server-side proxy holds the eBay credentials and feeds the new Browse tab. Regions go generic. The product is for anyone whose market the national comps don't describe.
2 September
A real site on Vercel, with everything in one database
Flipz leaves the prototype format for a proper hosted site. Every sale, message, listing and import moves into Postgres — the same database that snapshots eBay hourly so a brand-new crew is never pricing from nothing.
Now
Talking to resellers before building anything else
Twenty conversations, showing people the tool and asking what's most annoying about their week. If the same complaint comes up three times, that's the roadmap. It probably won't match ours.
Honest status
What's real today, and what isn't yet.
You should know this before you depend on it for anything critical.
Working now
- Live eBay Browse with projected return and confidence on every card
- Hourly snapshot history across ten reseller categories
- Leaderboard, feed, crew board, trade board, market — synced across devices
- CSV import and export; the Flip Desk calculator and pipeline
- Real accounts — email and password, usernames, verified badges; nobody can post as you
- Seven test suites, all green
Not yet
- Payments — the waitlist is how you get launch pricing
- Connecting your eBay account directly instead of importing a CSV
- Real-time chat — the crew board syncs every few seconds, not instantly
- A machine-learned price model — not until there are thousands of verified sales to train it on
Who's behind it
Two people, one crew, a running score.
Flipz is built and run by two co-founders with an equal stake and an equal share of the work — product, engineering, sourcing and operations are shared responsibilities, not separate departments. That is the whole team today, which is worth knowing before you depend on it for anything critical.
Miles
Co-founder
Miles brings the operator’s view: he sources and sells inventory himself, and Flipz is priced, tested and prioritised against those real transactions. His verified sales seeded the comp data the estimates are built on, and he led the product decisions behind accounts and verified profiles, the confidence-ranked Browse feed, the watchlist, and the marketplace. He shares engineering and support with Cruz equally.
Cruz
Co-founder
Cruz brings the systems view: he built and operates the platform — the live site, the eBay data pipeline and hourly snapshots, the Postgres data model, Google sign-in and the unified navigation — and turns what resellers keep asking for into the roadmap. He shares product direction and sourcing with Miles equally; every significant decision is made jointly.