CoinSnap alternatives — and why no photo can grade a coin

American coins are graded on the Sheldon scale from 1 to 70. The difference between two examples of the same date and mint mark separated by a few points on that scale is routinely a factor of ten in price, and at the top of the scale a single point can be a factor of a hundred.

What decides those points is surface: hairlines from cleaning, the strength of the strike, remaining mint lustre, contact marks, toning. These are assessed under controlled lighting and magnification by graders who train for years, and third-party services exist precisely because the market does not accept anybody's unaided opinion.

Two things follow. An app valuation from a phone photograph is an estimate for an average example of that issue, not for your coin. And the most damaging thing you can do in response to a valuation is clean the coin — hairlines are visible to any grader and typically remove half the premium or more. Tarnish on silver is not damage; it is a natural sulphide layer that many collectors prefer.

Melt value — the intrinsic worth of the metal — is the exception. It is arithmetic: actual silver or gold weight in troy ounces, from published mint specifications, multiplied by the current spot price. It does not depend on condition or opinion.

It functions as a floor. A common circulated silver coin will not sell meaningfully below its metal, because if it did somebody would buy it and melt it. It is also the fastest way to sanity-check an app valuation: if an app values a worn common silver quarter well above melt, ask why.

The dates that matter in US coinage are worth memorising because they settle most jar-sorting instantly. Dimes, quarters and half dollars dated 1964 and earlier are 90% silver; half dollars from 1965 to 1970 are 40%; war nickels from 1942 to 1945 with a large mint mark over Monticello are 35%. Everything circulating after 1970 is copper-nickel clad, and you can see the copper stripe on the edge. Our free melt calculator covers those plus the common British, Canadian and gold issues.

The single most expensive mistake in this hobby is selling a key date as scrap. Ten minutes with a date list separates the coins worth melt from the coins worth many multiples of it, and key dates are not obscure knowledge — every price guide lists them.

A short discipline that costs nothing:

1. Check the mint mark, not just the date. A 1916-D Mercury dime contains a couple of dollars of silver and sells for thousands; a 1916 without the D does not.
2. Do not clean anything. Ever. This is close to an absolute rule and it is the one people break first.
3. Get more than one offer. Dealer buy prices for identical common silver routinely vary by around ten percent in the same town.
4. Ask what percentage of spot you are being offered. A reputable dealer answers directly; for common circulated 90% silver, the high eighties to low nineties of spot is a normal buy price.
5. Look for errors and varieties — doubled dies, off-metal strikes, repunched mint marks — which are invisible to somebody weighing a bag and can be worth hundreds.

Melting US coinage is legal for silver and gold. It has been illegal since 2006 to melt or export cents and five-cent pieces for their metal content.

Sold prices, not asking prices. The most useful free tool in numismatics is an eBay search filtered to completed and sold listings. Asking prices in coins are aspirational; sold prices are the market.

Published guides. The PCGS and NGC price guides are free to consult online and are organised by date, mint mark and grade — which immediately shows you how much grade is doing.

Third-party grading. PCGS and NGC encapsulate and grade coins for a fee. It is worth it above a threshold value, and the threshold is lower than people assume for anything that might be a key date, because a graded coin sells for more and sells faster.

A local coin club. The American Numismatic Association lists member clubs, and they will look at a collection for nothing. Older members have seen more coins than any app and will tell you plainly when something is common.

Counterfeits are worth a paragraph of their own. Weight and diameter catch most of them — every legitimate coin has published specifications to a hundredth of a gram, and a cheap jeweller's scale and a caliper are the best-value tools in the hobby. A neodymium magnet slid down a tilted silver bar visibly slows, because silver is strongly diamagnetic; on a fake it sticks or slides freely.

Prices, in-app purchase tiers, ratings, versions and update dates are read from each app's US App Store listing on 2026-09-03 through Apple's Lookup API and product pages. Nothing is typed from memory and the build fails if a price appears in the prose.

This page has fewer alternatives than the others on the site, and that is honest rather than lazy: coin identification is a small app category, and the genuinely useful free tools here are a melt calculator, a sold-listings search and a person who has handled a lot of coins.