Mind the App: Coinsnap’s Pros & Cons

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Take out your phone, snap a couple photos of a coin, and instantly learn about its grade and value. This is the allure of apps like Coinsnap, which integrate artificial intelligence into the world of numismatics. But how reliable are these apps in practice? Coinsnap in particular excels as a digital organizer and identification tool, especially for foreign coins. However, its grading and valuation features are unreliable and should only be taken as a rough estimate. Furthermore, a look into the app’s parent company, Next Vision Limited, reveals a business model and marketing strategy potential users should be aware of.

There are other similar apps on the marketplace, such as CoinIn and CoinID, but Coinsnap is the clear market leader with its more advanced camera system, allowing for autozoom and blurriness identification, as well as offering the most services (grading especially). It also boasts a better overall user interface and experience. Coinsnap operates on a subscription model and generates revenue when users sign up for their premium service.

How Does It Work?

Coinsnap is a mobile app that uses AI to identify, price, and grade a coin, all from two pictures—one of the obverse and one of the reverse. Simply open the app, select the camera or “identify” feature, and take the photos. The app works quickly, and you’ll have the results in a few seconds. It provides a detailed analysis, offering a wide range of information, including the coins’ dimensions, mintage, and other general facts. Most importantly, it provides a grade for the piece and an estimated value; however, the accuracy of both is questionable at best.

Coins you have photographed with the app are neatly organized under a “Collection” tab, where the app offers a summary, including an interactive geographic distribution page of all the countries the user’s collection is from. The user can also further organize the coins into custom sets of their choosing. The app allows users to filter and sort their collection in various ways, such as by issuer and denomination. This is a nice feature and can be a fun way to organize and view date sets, series collections, type sets, etc.

Coin Identification

The coin identification feature of the app is excellent and the most useful aspect for numismatists. It greatly reduces the time and effort spent researching and trying to identify coins manually. This is useful especially for identifying foreign coins. On the app store, Coinsnap advertises its “99% recognition accuracy,” but sometimes the app will still make a mistake and misidentify a coin. A good way to check the accuracy of the identification is to look at the reference coin (shown below the picture of your coin) and compare it to the photo you took. This mostly applies to foreign examples and especially those made prior to the 17th century, and the more worn the coin is, the more prone the app is to mistakes.

The AI model utilized by the app is not trained on ancients, so it won’t be able to identify and assess them at all. It’ll misidentify the ancient as some other coin vaguely resembling its likeness. I submitted a Roman denarius, but the app mistook it for a 2018 coin from Malawi. In fact, the app will try to identify just about anything that is circular in nature. For instance, it said that my Coca Cola bottle cap is a Slovenian gold coin worth over $800. And I will admit, I spent quite a bit of time seeing just how far I could take it, getting it to misidentify a pizza as an About Uncirculated Indian Head cent.

Errors and varieties are also not included in its database. However, the app does provide a good amount of information for the user to identify these pieces themselves. It offers an “Error Coins” tab under the coin’s description that goes through all the prominent errors and varieties of that series. Selecting an error or variety will open a guide about that piece, including tips on how to identify one. This feature is mostly available for U.S. coins.

Coinsnap does not have the capacity to authenticate coins. Counterfeits easily slip past the AI system and are identified as if they are authentic. Various mint finishes, such as satin or reverse proof, are also difficult for the app to identify, and it will often miss them entirely or categorize them incorrectly. It does okay with proofs as long as the lighting in the photographs is good.

Grading & Valuation

Coinsnap operates on a subscription-based business model. It offers a seven-day free trial before charging a $39.99 annual fee. Where the premium and free versions of this app differ is in coin grading. With the free service, it offers only a grade range (e.g., Mint State), whereas the premium version attempts to pinpoint an actual numerical grade (e.g. Mint State-64). The premium version relies on a few metrics: wear and detail integrity, luster and eye appeal, and surface condition. It bases all of this solely on the images provided. As such, results can vary drastically depending on the lighting and quality of the photo.

Photos that more prominently show the luster of a mint-state coin are likely to get a higher grade. The same uncirculated coin shot in a different environment that doesn’t show luster as well can even come back as About Uncirculated. In fact, the app will often misidentify Mint State coins as About Uncirculated, mistaking flatter features (either in the coin’s design or from a weak strike), scratches, or bad lighting as wear. So, coins with overall flatter designs and lower reliefs are more likely to suffer from this.

Coinsnap also offers a price for your coin. Similarly to the assigned grade, treat the price as an estimate, as it is also by no means accurate. Sometimes the assigned price is conservative, while other times it is too generous. Depending on the coin, the app could also offer an estimated price range with wildly different ends of the spectrum. For example, a 2012-S proof half dollar I tested out had an estimated price of between $7.50 and $75. Unlike with its premium grading feature, Coinsnap offers no explanation on how it arrived at the estimated price, which leaves room for confusion. The prices are more accurate, generally speaking, for circulated examples with high supply, and only when the app accurately grades the coin.

Intended Users

For an app whose entire focus is coins, it has a surprising lack of footprint within the numismatic community. Next Vision Limited, the company behind Coinsnap, doesn’t prioritize this segment of potential customers and is generally uninvolved with numismatic groups. It seems to focus more on the general public, and the target audience isn’t seasoned collectors but rather casual coin owners, like those who inherited some coins from a family member and are wondering what they may be worth, or curious beginners.

A Hong Kong-based AI tech company specializing in mobile apps, Next Vision Limited  doesn’t work exclusively on Coinsnap. It has launched a plethora of these “identifier”-style apps for collectibles (comics, stamps, antiques, and more). Next Vision employs a broad marketing campaign, mainly done on social media such as Facebook and Instagram, to promote Coinsnap. These ads follow a distinct pattern, and you may have even come across one at some point. The ads are formulaic in how they showcase the app’s abilities by depicting a user scanning coins and, at some point, finding a super rare key date or variety worth thousands. This style of marketing has drawn criticism because it creates the illusion that anyone can make a couple extra thousand dollars by looking in their pocket change or coin jar, when in reality the odds of this are extremely slim. 

 It’s important to note that Coinsnap’s privacy policy indicates that it collects user data and does not disclose what it does with that data. It also reserves the right to use the photographs you take with the app in whatever way it likes. The user essentially doesn’t have sole ownership of the photos they take with the app.

To Download or Not to Download?

Coinsnap’s greatest strength is its ability to serve as a gateway into numismatics. From its broad ad campaign to its easy-to-use interface and engaging organization, the app presents itself as an appealing option for beginners and those simply curious, potentially sparking a deeper interest in the hobby. However, its grading and valuation features have much to be desired and are not yet reliable enough for serious collecting decisions.

For the experienced numismatist, the appeal is still present, however diminished. The app is an excellent tool for quickly identifying many coins. This could make sorting through junk drawers or bulk lots more fun and rewarding, not to mention educational too. It’s also a great way to store and view your collection digitally, especially for “raw” (unslabbed) coin collections. Ultimately, while Al may one day revolutionize coin grading, for now, Coinsnap is a testament to the technology’s potential. It is not a replacement for the trained human eye and the nuanced judgment of a professional grader.