Sources & Coverage
What's automated, what's hand-curated, and what we genuinely don't cover. We'd rather you know the real gaps than assume completeness we don't have.
What's fully automated
| Source | Provides | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Federal Register API (federalregister.gov) | Official notices that set U.S. Mint product prices annually (e.g. "Establish Prices for [year] United States Mint Precious Metal Products") | Confirmed open — no API key, documented JSON, fetched live |
What's hand-curated, and why
U.S. Mint release calendar, sell-out/backorder status, mintage and sales figures, and the official pricing grid are hand-curated weekly, not pulled from a live feed. We tested this directly: usmint.gov's homepage, its own robots.txt file, and every plausible feed URL all return an outright block (HTTP 403) to automated requests — with a plain request and with a full realistic browser request alike. That pattern points to blanket bot-management at the edge, not a targeted rule we could negotiate around, and we don't attempt workarounds on a source that's blocking us.
Instead, each week we read permitted secondary numismatic press — outlets whose robots.txt does not block automated tools, checked before each use, not assumed — cross-reference for consistency, and write entries in our own words with a real source URL logged for every one. An empty week with sources checked and nothing new to report is the honest outcome sometimes; we never invent a figure or a release that wasn't actually reported somewhere real.
Notable auction results — a small, manual section, not a feed
Major auction houses' own terms explicitly prohibit automated access to their results (one has litigated exactly this against a competitor), and several numismatic outlets' own robots.txt files explicitly disallow AI/automated fetching. We treat an explicit block as a hard no, full stop — so auction coverage here is a small, editorially-curated section (roughly 1–3 items per week) drawn only from outlets that don't block us, cited by URL, and summarized in our own words. It is not, and won't become, a comprehensive auction database.
What we don't cover at all
- Real-time bullion spot price. The official gold/silver benchmark requires a paid data license we don't hold. Instead, we track the Mint's own official pricing grid — a real, Mint-published, market-linked event that updates weekly — as the "did my coin's price move, and why" signal. This is not a continuous spot-price feed.
- Per-grade retail price-guide data (the kind third-party grading services publish) is proprietary to those services and out of scope here.
- A comprehensive auction-results database. See above — we cite a small, curated set of results, not a searchable archive of realized prices.
No creative content, ever
We publish facts (prices, dates, mintage figures, status) and our own written synthesis of them. We never republish an outlet's article text, and we never reproduce coin design images or auction-house photos — coin and medal designs can themselves carry separate copyright even when the underlying sales data is public.