On 15 and 16 September 2026 SLABHIT went live: more than 100 live auctions for trading cards in two days, broadcast from Bad Saarow in Brandenburg, Germany. The app reached the iPhones through Apple's own route for apps before the App Store, and it has since been approved. What happened in those 48 hours, how the auction formats work and what we take from it as founders.
What Happened on 15 and 16 September: Opening Show and Surprise Show
SLABHIT went live on Tuesday, 15 September 2026, at 6 pm. The Opening Show ran six hours until midnight, a marathon, broadcast from Bad Saarow in Brandenburg, Germany. By midnight more than 70 lots had sold, and at peak over 90 people were watching at the same time; both figures come from Benedikt's post the next morning, while my own screenshots from the show read between 24 and 37 viewers. On Wednesday the Surprise Show followed from 8 to 10 pm. Two days brought more than 100 auctions. Both evenings were deliberately kept to family and friends: real accounts, real payment methods, real bids, and a team that fixed every fault the same evening.
On the table was a colourful show: a Charizard with the 25th anniversary stamp and a Blastoise with the same stamp, illustration rares from Scarlet and Violet 151, One Piece, graded cards in their holders, meaning slabs, plus boxes and boosters from 151. The Charizard ex from the Japanese 151 set in PSA 10 sat on the table at 790 euros, the 2001 Surfing Pikachu in PSA 8 at 180 euros, in between an Umbreon V from Evolving Skies in PSA 9 at 450 euros. The first hammer of the evening went to a 151 booster for 18 euros; auction number 30 brought a Vaporeon ex for 6 euros. That is how it should stay: Pokémon, One Piece, Magic and sports cards, something for every collector. What everyone is hunting right now, by the way, is the Charizard with the 30th anniversary stamp from the newest collection. What a slab is and why the grade on the label sets the price is covered in What a Slab Is.
Why we are building SLABHIT at all has been on this site since July: Slabhit: Why We're Rebuilding Live Shopping for Trading Cards. This piece is the report from the start itself: the way into the app, the auction formats and seven things we learned in 48 hours of live operation.
The Way Into the App: TestFlight as the Side Entrance, App Store Shortly
At launch the app was still in Apple's review. We kept the date anyway, because Apple itself has built an official route that puts an app on an iPhone before it reaches the App Store: TestFlight. Through that route everyone with an iPhone got into the production app, with a real profile, real payment method, real shipping address and real bids. The four steps were listed at https://slabhit.de/app: install TestFlight, open the invitation, create an account, add a shipping address and payment method.
Apple has since approved the app, and it appears in the App Store shortly. Anyone who joined via TestFlight keeps their account, bids and settings, because it is the same database. Bidding stays as simple as on the first evening: install the app, add a shipping address and credit card, bid; shipping then runs by itself. Without a stored payment method no bid goes through, and that is intentional: a winning bid is a purchase, not a declaration of interest.
Anyone without an iPhone was there too. Watching works on any device in the browser; the "Live zuschauen" button on https://slabhit.de leads to the running show. For our audience that is no fringe group: 45.2 percent of mobile visitors to slabhit.de before launch came on Android. For them there is the waiting list, and from 18 September the build of the Android app begins.
What I take from this for any launch: a date you have made public is worth more than the perfect route to it. Almost every platform has a side entrance it built itself. You have to know it before you need it, and describe it so that a collector at 5:55 pm gets through in four minutes.
The Auction Formats: Clock, Dutch Drop and the Wildcard and Quality Pipelines
Live commerce lives on the time an item spends on the table. So SLABHIT does not have one format but a clock per lot, the Dutch Drop and pipelines that take the preparation off the seller's hands.
The auction with a clock. Every lot, which is the word for a single auction, gets its own clock. The seller sets it in advance between ten and sixty seconds, in steps of five; many lots start at one euro. Every bid resets the clock to ten seconds, not plus ten but back to ten: whoever bids at two seconds sees ten again, and as long as bidding continues the lot keeps running. Sellers who want pace switch on sudden death, and then zero is zero: when the clock runs out, it is sold. The reset rule is the one that convinces me. Without it, whoever taps in the last second wins not because the card means the most to them but because they were faster. The ten seconds are no accident; in testing they produced the best baskets. On top of that, every lot can carry a buy-now price, a fixed price at which it sits in the shop during the show.
The pipelines. A show is prepared before the camera runs. The seller creates pipelines, lists of lots with shared presets for starting price, clock and format, and every lot inherits them. Wildcard is the pipeline for single cards in volume: 50 slots, say, every lot from one euro, the item's photo is taken automatically during the show, the seller holds the card up to the camera and presses. Quality is the pipeline for everything of value, slabs and sealed product, with a starting price that is passed on to every lot and adjusted case by case. Default takes everything else, including whatever is added spontaneously during the show. The rule of thumb behind it: pipelines set the rule, lots the exception.
The Dutch Drop. This is the reverse auction as an instant buy: the seller has several identical items, the price starts high and falls visibly for everyone. Whoever taps buys immediately at that moment's price. The first buyers pay more because they want the item for certain; whoever waits is gambling against the other viewers. The first Dutch Drop on SLABHIT ran in the Surprise Show on 16 September: ten identical items in two minutes, instead of ten single runs over the clock. Television has used the principle for decades; in live trading card commerce nobody had built it before.
After the show. All of a buyer's winning bids and instant buys from the same show are billed together and shipped in one parcel. Shipping is charged once, not per item, and the buyer has already paid it at purchase. The seller prints the shipping label from the seller area, sticks it on, hands the parcel in. For tax, SLABHIT is built for Germany: sellers can opt for the margin scheme under section 25a of the German VAT Act (UStG), the rule for resellers who bought goods without VAT being charged, for instance from private collectors; VAT is then due only on the margin. Whether the rule fits a particular case is something every seller settles with their tax adviser; this is not tax advice. SLABHIT itself earns a platform fee on the sale price.
Startup Launch: Seven Lessons From 48 Hours of Live Operation
Two days of live operation show more than two months of preparation. Seven points, each with what is different now.
First: whatever a human has to type out will be typed out wrong. One collector had copied the invitation code from a screenshot and lost three characters on the way. The code has eight characters and is case-sensitive. Since then the link sits everywhere as a button in front of the code, the code is shown large for copying, and one sentence says the link needs no code.
Second: an access point lives in exactly one place. An older invitation link from the preparation weeks led into the test database instead of the real one. Anyone who had used it would have created their account in the wrong world. Now link and code sit in one place in the website's code, and every page, every email and the check scripts read from there. Two check scripts flag any foreign link before it goes live.
Third: on launch day the homepage has one job, which is to lead to the show. In the night before launch there were 906 characters of text between the first screen and the show preview on a phone. Now there are 33. On the second evening we cut the launch block from roughly 1,000 to 310 characters and removed the three text blocks under the countdown entirely. The homepage does not explain, it leads; everything explanatory has its own page.
Fourth: a show needs a start and a duration, or the site calculates wrongly. A programme entry without a time counted as an all-day event for the website, and in the evening the "Live now" button would have been missing. Later the site still showed a show as running that had ended three quarters of an hour earlier, because the duration had been estimated rather than entered. Both are fixed. The rule behind them: an event without an end is not an event, and an assumption is not a measurement.
Fifth: in launch week the time between decision and live state is what counts. Until the second day every change to the website took between 11 and 16 minutes, because the deploy uploaded all 412 files individually and verified each one individually. The amount of data was not the problem, the number of files was. Since Wednesday afternoon the deploy uploads only what has changed: the upload step fell from 785 seconds to 11, the whole run from 16 minutes to under three. At twenty changes a day that is four hours that go back into the show.
Sixth: a state nobody measures is unchecked, even when everything is green. In dark mode the "Watch live" button turned into a white area with no text when the mouse moved over it. Every check was green, because none of them measured the hover state. Now a check script moves the mouse onto the buttons and measures the contrast at rest and on hover. Hover, focus and keyboard belong in the check.
Seventh: an automation that waits for a human fires at the wrong moment. The music for six hours of show was a playlist of 143 titles, built in the afternoon. A clean-up run for it was waiting for a window to become visible, and it fired when I opened that window and scrolled in it. It deleted a title that was meant to stay. At 5:25 pm, 35 minutes before the start, the list was back in order. Since then the rule is: no run stays armed that waits for an event a human triggers, and before any repair the complete current state is read first.
Above all of it stands the point that gave us the most pleasure: we found many faults and fixed them while running, between two lots, while the clock was ticking. That only works when development and broadcast sit at the same table. Thanks to Bene, who built the app.
Co-Founder Benedikt Bingler on Building the App
At launch Benedikt described on LinkedIn what building SLABHIT would have cost by the conventional calculation and what it actually cost. His post of 16 September counts more than 70 lots sold and over 90 simultaneous viewers at peak for the first evening, with the technology running through without a hitch. The article by The Agentics that he published alongside it costs the build with Barry Boehm's COCOMO model: on launch day the platform's code comprises about 192,750 lines. In the model's conservative mode that equals 602 person-months, at 8,500 euros per month roughly 5.1 million euros, or ten engineers over five years. We built it in six months with one engineer responsible for specification and governance and, on average, three AI agents, for about 60,000 euros all-in. Not counted are around 103,000 lines of specification that serve the agents as their contract; add 108 database migrations and 314 test files that still hold after six months. The article is at https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/we-shipped-51m-platform-6-months-3-ai-engineers-60k-the-agentics-0ey2e/
What stands behind those figures: the app, the website, the emails and the check scripts came out of a small team with AI agents in the engine room. How we organise that is on the topic page E-Commerce and Live Commerce.
What Comes Next: A Sprint Show From Berlin, Then the Sellers Take Over
The first two evenings we broadcast ourselves. On Thursday, 17 September, a short Sprint Show follows at 8:15 pm from the road: I broadcast from a founders' event at Mindspace in Berlin, where startups pitch to a jury, sixty minutes with a box break from 151 and Prismatic Evolutions and three slabs. The purpose is the proof that broadcasting works on the go, an iPhone is enough.
From 18 September the sellers who applied take over with their own shows, and with that the real operation begins: several broadcasts a day, each with its own stock and its own audience. For us the next phase begins with it: brand, marketing and the Android app. The programme is at https://slabhit.de, bidding goes through https://slabhit.de/app.
Anyone selling on SLABHIT also has a topic that concerns every platform: when selling trading cards starts to count for tax in Germany is covered in Selling Trading Cards and Taxes in Germany.
We are building SLABHIT because the cards have been with us since our youth and still bring joy, and because this market moves a lot, offers opportunities and rewards work. It is a pleasure to build in these times, and we are growing: anyone who wants to build with us finds the way at https://slabhit.de/karriere. The first 48 hours confirmed why we do this.
The Figures at a Glance, With Source and Date
So that every figure above stays verifiable, here is where each one comes from. Status is 17 September 2026, 4 pm.
- more than 100 auctions in two days; our own count, as of Wednesday evening
- more than 70 lots by midnight and over 90 viewers at peak on the first evening; LinkedIn post by Benedikt Bingler of 16 September 2026
- 24 to 37 viewers, first hammer 18 euros, slabs at 180 to 790 euros; our own screenshots from the Opening Show
- Opening Show 15 September, 6 pm to midnight, Surprise Show 16 September, 8 to 10 pm, Sprint Show 17 September, 8:15 pm, 60 minutes; programme on slabhit.de
- ten identical items in two minutes in the first Dutch Drop; Surprise Show, our own count
- 45.2 percent Android share of mobile visitors to slabhit.de; our own measurement from 6 September 2026, before launch
- 906 down to 33 characters on a phone, roughly 1,000 down to 310 characters in the launch block; measured on the delivered HTML
- 785 down to 11 seconds in the upload step, 16.0 down to 2.7 minutes overall, 412 files; timestamps of the deploy runs on 15 and 16 September
- Clock per lot ten to sixty seconds, a bid resets it to ten; seller guide as of 17 September 2026
- 143 titles, eight and a half hours of playlist, repaired between 5:12 and 5:25 pm; our own record from 15 September
- 192,750 lines of code, 5.1 million euros under COCOMO, about 60,000 euros in reality, 103,000 lines of specification, 108 migrations, 314 test files; article by The Agentics of 16 September 2026
All figures on shows, website and deploy are our own measurements; the figures on building the platform come from the linked article by The Agentics.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is SLABHIT?
SLABHIT is a live commerce auction platform for trading cards from Bad Saarow in Brandenburg, Germany. Sellers broadcast live, every lot gets its own clock, and all of a buyer's winning bids from one show are billed and shipped together. SLABHIT launched on 15 September 2026 with a six-hour Opening Show.
How do I get into the SLABHIT app?
Apple has approved the app, and it appears in the App Store shortly. Until then the route runs via TestFlight, Apple's official route for apps before the App Store; the steps are at https://slabhit.de/app. In both cases it is the same production app, and account, bids and settings stay. Bidding requires a shipping address and a credit card. Watching works without the app in the browser via the Live zuschauen button on https://slabhit.de.
How does the auction with a clock work at SLABHIT?
Every lot gets its own clock; the seller sets between ten and sixty seconds. Every bid resets the clock to ten seconds, as long as bidding continues the lot keeps running, and the highest bid wins. Optionally sudden death applies: when the clock runs out, it is sold.
What is a Dutch Drop?
The reverse auction as an instant buy for several identical items, such as boosters from the same set. The price starts high and falls visibly for everyone; whoever taps buys immediately at that moment's price. In the Surprise Show on 16 September 2026 ten identical items went that way in two minutes.
How many auctions ran on the first two days?
More than 100 auctions on 15 and 16 September 2026, spread across the six-hour Opening Show on Tuesday and the two-hour Surprise Show on Wednesday. By midnight of the first evening more than 70 lots had sold, and at peak over 90 people were watching at the same time.
Is SLABHIT available for Android?
Not yet. Watching works on any device in the browser via https://slabhit.de; bidding requires the iPhone app. For Android there is the waiting list on slabhit.de, and from 18 September 2026 the build of the Android app begins.
Warm regards,
Dennis Weidner
