Ardatirion

Earlier this evening the website www.coinarchives.com went from being a free-to-all database of completed auctions to a paysite. Now, only auctions from the past sixth months are available for free on coinarchives. To access the others, one must sign up for Coinarchives Pro at the cost of $500 a year.

http://www.coinarchives.com/

Don't worry too much. The previous sixth months should be enough for most purposes, particularly for price tracking.

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GDJMSP

That is truly a shame. It's gonna become one lonely web site.

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silvereagle82

Wow what a bummer ......
I guess I wouldn't mind a small fee $50/$100 per year for (non-dealers) but $600/year !!!
Obviously it will become mostly a dealer use only website.

Ardatirion,
Most of the coins I research using Coinarchives.com don't show up every six months ... I'm looking for years of info so for me it is a definite setback in my research capabilities

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Drusus

indeed...a shame

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(v)

My first thoughts when I read the title.

I guess we have to go back to the old fashioned way of looking up auction catalogs and prices realized-- now would need to retain those booklets...

Gao

Wow. That sucks. I'm surprised it jumped to a price that high immediately. I expected something like $10 a month if that when I read the title of this thread.

Drusus

This makes the site almost useless for those not paying that huge sum and I would think more collectors cant or wont pay such a sum so it will now become the domain of the larger dealers...

I used to do searches just to look at all the cool different coins and use it as a learning tool...I would download some of the coins and medal I found more interesting and that was one of the few places I could look up more obscure coins and medals...now I wish I had downloaded far far far more of the images for my own personal use...maybe thats why they implemented this with such little warning...to keep people from rushing there and downloading as many of the images as they could

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byrd740

That is truly a shame because like said before, nearly everything that I looked for would be years past. I guess we have to look to other venues.

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GDJMSP

That's the probelm - there aren't any. Coin Archives was the first, and only, such search engine.

I will agree that it is a tremendous amount of work to organize, search and report all realized auction results, complete with pictures, if only from the sources that they use, there are plenty they do not use by the way. But it was not only the best source there was - it was the only source.

And don't even talk about Numismaster because that's a joke when it comes to prices and obscure and older items. Yeah the info they have is great, but it is severely limited.

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Drusus

yeah, thats the problem...now we will have to use the scattered resources of other specialized sites. There are a lot of reference sites but few that combined all eras with realized prices. That site alone educated me on so many different eras...I would spend hours just browsing through after doing a general search. When I find a coin or a medal that is more rare and I cant find it anywhere...I often could find it there and no other place.

I would even pay for the service but not the amount they are asking...I assumed that the auction houses that feed the site was funding it.

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schatzy

I didn't even know anything about this website so I guess I am not missing anything.

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AnemicOak

Bummer. I used the site a lot when helping folks ID coins.

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Drusus

yeah...makes one wonder if cloaking historical auction prices might be one reason to only allow the free user to see back a few month tops. It is certainly almost useless to me now and is hiding information that most wont be able to afford now. I am already starting to be priced out of collecting ancients anyway. Its like guns...I cant even find a gun for under 100 bucks these days, even at gun shows...A gun I bought years ago for 200 dollars cant be found for under a thousand now.

I complain and it sux not to have it as a resource but I guess we could just be happy that we had it for free for so long and I was able to learn alot in that time.

My theory: They offer it for 600 USD and people get in an uproar about how expensive it is...then...they knock the price down to 30 and compared to 600 this seems like the best deal ever!! So they get far more people willing to pay for something they used to get for free because its cheaper that 600 bucks!! As compared to just announcing they are making people pay 30 bucks for something they used to get for free. If people think they are getting 600 dollars worth of service for just 30...that makes it more desirable than just being told you now have to pay 30 dollars for something that was completely free yesterday. I wish, then I could still use it as I would pay for it at that price for sure and I am sure many others would as well...not sure if the money is as important as the information they are hiding from the bulk of collectors.

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Eduard

Well, it was too good to be true, and it was.

I am not at all surprised they are going this route. Why give away precious information for free? They have nothing to lose, and it is not going to cause the auction houses that feed them to lose sales.
I have also heard that Heritage was considering charging for use of their Archives, but they seem to have dropped the idea. However, the two are not to be compared.

I know that I would pay to use Heritage Archives. I would also pay a certain amount to use CoinArchives "pro", but certainly not $600. I hope Drusus theory is correct, and that the fees come down to a reasonable level.

GDJMSP

Numismaster was originally $179 a year. After about a year of few using it they dropped it to $79 a year. This'll probably go the same route - I hope.

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