About us
Built by a collector and an AI
This project was “vibe coded.” Alpacaguy brought the idea, the cards, the photos and every decision. Claude, an AI assistant made by Anthropic, working through Claude Code, did the building: it repaired the home servers, wrote every line of code, designed the pages, set up the email, the robot helpers and the daily pricing, cut 120 cards out of phone photos, launched the public site and wrote the documentation, including this page. When something broke, Claude diagnosed it and fixed it.
19
working sessions
Sept 2–27, 2026 (the build)
Sept 2–27, 2026 (the build)
6,052
Claude responses
(each one a step of work)
(each one a step of work)
2.4 billion
AI tokens read
(≈ 1.8 billion words)
(≈ 1.8 billion words)
5.1 million
AI tokens written
(≈ 3.8 million words of code, docs, replies)
(≈ 3.8 million words of code, docs, replies)
AI tokens are not trumpets
An AI token is a piece of text about ¾ of a word long; the numbers above measure how much Claude read and wrote. The read figure
is large because Claude re-reads the conversation and files at every step. The thing you earn and spend here is the trumpet:
a regular Glass Trumpet counts as 1, and every listing in the Card Corral is priced in them.Timeline
Sep 2–5
The home lab gets a partner
Claude audits the home servers and fixes them: backups, firewall, certificates, alerts, a code archive and a wiki.
Claude audits the home servers and fixes them: backups, firewall, certificates, alerts, a code archive and a wiki.
Sep 6–8
The shop idea
A WordPress card shop, alpacaguy.com, the Glass Trumpet promotion and a card-data server for details and prices.
A WordPress card shop, alpacaguy.com, the Glass Trumpet promotion and a card-data server for details and prices.
Sep 12–22
Brains and eyes
A local AI server on workstation graphics cards, the automation server, monitoring and temperature protection.
A local AI server on workstation graphics cards, the automation server, monitoring and temperature protection.
Sep 25–26
The big change
No more selling. Mail in Glass Trumpets, earn credit, pick cards from the Card Corral. New logo, trading rules and mailbox.
No more selling. Mail in Glass Trumpets, earn credit, pick cards from the Card Corral. New logo, trading rules and mailbox.
Sep 27
Launch day
alpacaguy.com goes live: visitor poll, AI trade inbox, daily pricing, 120 Card Corral cards from 16 photos, and this page.
alpacaguy.com goes live: visitor poll, AI trade inbox, daily pricing, 120 Card Corral cards from 16 photos, and this page.
Sep 28–30
Discord, ledger, card inbox
A trade ledger with a balance per trader, a Discord bot, and an AI vision pipeline that crops, identifies and prices a photographed batch.
A trade ledger with a balance per trader, a Discord bot, and an AI vision pipeline that crops, identifies and prices a photographed batch.
Oct 1–14
Hall of Horns, charts, findable
A page about the Glass Trumpet card, price charts on every listing, featured and sealed listings, slab filters, a daily digest and files for search engines and AI assistants.
A page about the Glass Trumpet card, price charts on every listing, featured and sealed listings, slab filters, a daily digest and files for search engines and AI assistants.
Oct 16–26
Power, alerts, nothing from home
A 3 kWh Bluetti feeds both UPSs, the cluster shuts itself down in order after 90 seconds without mains, alerts reach a phone, and the Cloudflare Tunnel is retired.
A 3 kWh Bluetti feeds both UPSs, the cluster shuts itself down in order after 90 seconds without mains, alerts reach a phone, and the Cloudflare Tunnel is retired.
Oct 27
Trumpets, not tokens
Tokens were confusing. Listings are priced in trumpets, dollars sit behind a tap-to-reveal mask, low-value singles become lots, the Trade Tracker shows balances, and the Discord gift is one free card.
Tokens were confusing. Listings are priced in trumpets, dollars sit behind a tap-to-reveal mask, low-value singles become lots, the Trade Tracker shows balances, and the Discord gift is one free card.
Where it lives
A home lab: one custom server and three retired workstations
The private side of the site runs at home on a small cluster of four machines running Proxmox, free software that splits each one into many small, separate servers. Every service is snapshotted before a change and backed up nightly, and if one machine needs maintenance the others keep going. Nothing at home is reachable from the internet: the public only ever sees the Cloudflare copy. Into hardware? Take the nerdy tour: Under the Hood, with every node, GPU and container.
Four machines
A custom-built main server and three retired desktops.
➜
Proxmox
Splits each machine into many small, separate servers.
➜
Snapshots & backups
Every change can be undone; nightly backups to a storage server.
➜
Battery backup
A 3 kWh power station feeds two UPSs; if the lights stay off, the cluster shuts itself down in order.
Since launch, for the nerds
- Power: a Bluetti Elite 300 (3 kWh) sits between the wall and both APC UPSs, good for about five hours at the cluster’s usual 600 W. After 90 seconds without mains, apcupsd shuts the nodes, containers and VMs down in order, then cuts the UPS.
- Watching: Home Assistant reads the Bluetti, Prometheus and Grafana watch everything else, and alerts push to a phone through a self-hosted ntfy server. Warnings wait for a daily 7 am digest email.
- Nothing published from home: the Cloudflare Tunnel is retired. The card inbox and automations live on the private network over Tailscale; the public sites are static copies on Cloudflare Pages.
- Card inbox: phone photos of a batch go to a small web app; OpenCV crops every card and Claude’s vision models read name, set and number. Slabs are priced per grade from PriceCharting.
- Small things: a managed switch, 16 GB of RAM in the fourth node, idle GPUs sleeping at 5 W, and the CPU miners switched off for the power budget.
The big picture
How the Trumpet Trading Post works
You mail us Glass Trumpet Pokémon cards, they count as trumpets (a regular one is 1, foils 3, full arts 10 and up), and you spend those trumpets on listings from our Card Corral. No money changes hands. Here is how a card and a trade move through the system.
Photograph
Cards are photographed front and back in their sleeves; a program finds and crops each one.
➜
Identify & list
Set and number are checked against a public card database, then the card gets a listing on our private editing site.
➜
Price daily
A robot helper checks market prices every morning and sets the trumpets.
➜
Publish
A read-only copy goes to Cloudflare’s global network.
➜
You visit
Fast pages from a server near you.
You email us
Your handle, roughly how many Glass Trumpets you’re sending, and any cards you want.
➜
AI sorts it
A small AI on our own computer summarises it; your message never leaves us.
➜
We get an alert
The trade is logged as pending so nothing gets lost.
➜
Envelope arrives
Cards counted; trumpets credited on the Trade Tracker, or type /balance in Discord.
➜
Cards ship
Your picks go out within the week in a plain white envelope. Tracking costs 10 trumpets.
The toolbox
The services we use
WordPress
What it is: The most popular website-building software in the world.
How we use it: Our private editor. Every page, listing, photo and price lives here.
Cloudflare
What it is: A large internet company with servers in hundreds of cities.
How we use it: Hosts the public copy of the site (its Pages service) and the “are you human?” check on our poll.
n8n (“n-eight-n”)
What it is: Automation software that runs step-by-step routines on a schedule.
How we use it: Our robot helper: re-prices the Card Corral every morning and logs every trade email.
Ollama (local AI)
What it is: Runs AI language models on our own graphics cards.
How we use it: Reads trade emails and pulls out the key facts. Your email stays with us.
Card price sources
What it is: TCGplayer (US), Cardmarket (Europe) and PriceCharting (graded slabs).
How we use it: Checked every day to set fair trumpet prices.
Claude
What it is: An AI assistant made by Anthropic, used through Claude Code.
How we use it: Built and maintains all of the above.
Pricing
How a trumpet price is set
Trumpets ≈ market price × condition × 90% × 4 per $1
| Market price | The average of TCGplayer and Cardmarket (converted to dollars). Japanese cards use Cardmarket, which tracks them best. |
|---|---|
| Condition | Near Mint 100% · Lightly Played 85% · Moderately Played 70% · Heavily Played 50% · Damaged 35% |
| 90% | Every card is priced 10% below market, our thank-you for trading with us. |
| Example | A Near Mint card selling for about $5.00 → $5.00 × 1.00 × 0.90 × 4 = 18 trumpets. |
| Lots | Singles worth under 5 trumpets are bundled into lots, priced as the sum of their cards. |
| Dollars | Still on every listing behind a tap-to-reveal mask, with links to today’s prices on TCGplayer, Cardmarket, PriceCharting and eBay. |
Trading with us
What your trumpets are worth
| Regular Glass Trumpet | 1 trumpet. Played is fine; heavily played still counts as 1. |
|---|---|
| Any foil or stamp | 3 trumpets. Fan art is welcome and also counts as 3. |
| Full art or regional print | 10 trumpets or more. |
| Discord welcome gift | Join the Discord and take one free card worth up to 10 trumpets. No catches. |
| Your balance | Public on the Trade Tracker, where you can look yourself up, or /balance in Discord. |
Spot a mistake, earn trumpets! The site is still in beta. Tell us about anything wrong (a price, a card detail, a typo)
and we credit you 50 trumpets.
When you visit
What happens when you open alpacaguy.com
The public site is a set of ready-made pages (a “static site”) served from the Cloudflare server nearest you, so there is no database behind it to break into and pages load fast even on a slow phone. When we change something in the private editor, a fresh copy is published automatically.
- No accounts, no passwords, no forms. Email is the only way to contact us, so you choose what to share. Nothing on your side can be hacked.
- No tracking. No cookies, no analytics scripts, no cookie banner. The poll on the Trumpet Binder page is one vote per browser, stored anonymously.
- Real photos of real cards. Every listing shows our own photo of the actual card you’ll receive, front and back. We never copy images from other websites.