Every LEGO investing tool was broken. So I built my own.

I lived with seventeen tabs open for about a year before I got tired of it.

BrickEconomy in one. Brickset in another. BrickLink in three more, because I was pricing minifigs one at a time. A Reddit thread that hadn't loaded in a week. Amazon comparing MSRPs. eBay checking sold listings. My own dumb spreadsheet on top of all of it. That was the workflow for figuring out whether a single LEGO set was worth buying.

The tools weren't bad. Each one did its part well. BrickEconomy's forecasts were reasonable. Brickset had the deepest catalog and lifecycle data on the planet. BrickLink was the only real source of truth on minifig prices. Reddit had actual people who cared. But every one of them was answering a different question — and the question I actually had was should I buy this specific set today, and if so, how do I make money on it.

None of them answered that one.

The moment I gave up on the stack

The specific thing that broke me was watching a friend spend a hundred and eighty dollars on a set at MSRP because a Redditor said it was going to be "huge."

It was not going to be huge. Its five sibling sets in the same subtheme had done between plus four percent and minus eleven percent over the previous four years. If we'd had a dashboard that pulled the sibling data automatically, he would have seen the trend in ten seconds. Instead he had a Reddit vibe and an Amazon Buy Now button.

He ate the loss. And I realized every AFOL investor I knew was making decisions the same way — on partial information, from tabs that didn't talk to each other, with the deciding vote often going to whichever forum poster typed with the most confidence.

I closed the tabs and opened a spreadsheet.

The seven columns that mattered

The spreadsheet started small. Every set I actively cared about, one row. Retail price, current secondary average, retirement date, minifig value sum, discount depth. Five columns. Enough to compare two sets side by side.

Then I added the columns nobody else was combining.

Theme sibling performance. What did the last five sets in this same subtheme do post-retirement? If Icons cars ran plus twenty percent on average and this one's a Ferrari, I want to know that before I click buy.

Retirement momentum. Not "when will it retire" — every source has that, and none of them are right. What I wanted was the delta between the estimated retirement date and the actual on-shelf age. Sets that have been on shelf longer than their theme's average lifespan are already overdue, which is a different signal than "retiring in eighteen months."

The spread. Amazon versus BrickLink versus eBay for the same set, right now. If Amazon is twenty percent off MSRP and BrickLink secondary is already trading above MSRP, that's a set with instant equity at the register. Nobody was surfacing that spread in one view.

Seven columns. All of them mattered. None of them told the whole story on their own.

That was the point of the spreadsheet — combined, the columns pointed at an answer. Apart, they were just data.

Turning it into a score

The problem with a seven-column spreadsheet is you still have to read all seven columns. Which is fewer than seventeen tabs. But still enough to slow you down when a deal is time-sensitive.

So I did what any impatient investor does when they've built a spreadsheet good enough to trust: I turned it into a single number.

The Stud Score is a proprietary fifty-to-hundred grade that weights all seven signals into one output. Every set I track gets scored. Ten seconds to know if a deal is real.

I'm not going to walk you through the exact algorithm. That part is proprietary — it's the part I spent months tuning, and it's the part that makes Brick Tracker different from a fancier spreadsheet. But every score is public. So are the signals feeding it. Every set page on the site lays out the reasoning in plain language, so you can decide if you agree with the grade.

Free. Forever.

The scores never go behind a paywall. That's the promise.

Not free with a paywall coming later. Not free with ads. Not free-if-you-share-your-friends'-emails. Free the way a public stock ticker is free — because collectors deserve to see the market the same way traders do.

If I ever build a paid product on top of this — and I will, eventually — it'll be the alerts service. Real-time buy signals pushed to your inbox the second a set crosses the threshold. Retirement warnings a year in advance. Price floor notifications when Amazon drops a deal you had on your watchlist. That's what I'll charge for, and only if you want the push. The scores stay open.

Because "buy modulars" is not a strategy. And you shouldn't have to pay a subscription to know that.

What Brick Tracker actually is

Four products. One system underneath.

All four sit on top of the same Stud Score. Same seven signals. Same math. The site is the free surface everyone gets. The alerts are the push notifications for people who want them. The editorial is my thinking, in the open. The Trader is what happens when the score gets pointed at every marketplace at once.

The ask

Every LEGO investing tool I used before this made me do more work. Brick Tracker's whole job is to do less. Fewer tabs. Faster decisions. Better outcomes.

If you're the kind of collector who's had seventeen tabs open trying to price out one Icons car, you already know exactly why this exists. Come use it. It's free.

The Stud Score is proprietary. The scores are free.

That's the pitch. Any questions.