Every Discord server built around buying things has the same recurring thread. In a PC building server it's "is $380 fair for a used 3080?". In a retro collecting server it's "what's a loose EarthBound going for these days?". Somebody answers from memory, somebody else links an eBay search, and the thread scrolls away.
A price bot turns that into a slash command. This guide covers how to set one up, what the numbers mean, and where they stop being useful.
The short version
- Add the free CresvaMent Discord bot to a server where you have the Manage Server permission, or to your own Discord account if you don't run the server (it then works in any server or DM). It asks for no permissions.
- Type
/priceand start typing an item name. Pick it from the autocomplete list. - Read the reply: a median asking price for each condition, the 25th and 75th percentile around it, the number of listings behind each figure, and the 90-day trend.
The bot covers the items that have a CresvaMent deal page: a set of retro games plus graphics cards, CPUs, SSDs and server RAM. It is not a search of everything on eBay. If an item isn't in the autocomplete list, it isn't tracked yet.
What /price tells you
A typical reply for a graphics card lists Used, Refurbished and New separately. A retro game lists Loose, CIB (complete in box) and Sealed. Each condition gets three prices and a count:
- Median. The middle asking price. Half the matching listings ask less, half ask more.
- P25 and P75. The 25th and 75th percentile. The middle half of listings sit between them.
- n. How many listings the figures came from.
The band is more useful than the median on its own. If a seller in your swap channel offers a card below the P25, they're asking less than three quarters of eBay sellers. That's either a good deal or a reason to ask why. An offer above the P75 is at the expensive end of what's listed.
The n tells you how much to trust it. A Used median built from fifty listings is a solid read on what sellers want. A Sealed median from four listings is a hint at best, and it can jump from one day to the next when a single listing appears or sells. A condition with no listings at all is left out of the reply rather than filled with a guess.
Asking prices are not sold prices
This is the most important thing to understand about these numbers, so it's worth saying plainly: every figure the bot shows is an asking price. It's what sellers are listing the item for on eBay right now, not what buyers paid.
Asking prices usually run above sale prices. Overpriced listings sit unsold and stay in the sample; well-priced ones sell quickly and drop out. So treat the median as the top of a negotiation, or as what you'd pay to buy one today, and check eBay's sold listings before you pay or price your own sale.
Sold-price sites like PriceCharting answer a different question (what copies actually sold for). The two are complementary.
Where the numbers come from
Each tracked item has its own tuned CresvaMent search. It watches new eBay Buy It Now listings and drops the listings that would wreck a price figure: reproductions, box-only and manual-only listings, for-parts and not-working items, laptop GPUs listed under a desktop card's name, and display-less mining cards.
Once a day, just after midnight UTC, a snapshot computes the median and percentiles for each condition across the listings currently matching that search. The bot reads those figures from the same public API the deal pages use, so /price in Discord and the item's deal page always agree.
That also means the prices move daily, not minute by minute. If you want to see the actual listings, /deals shows the five most recent ones that passed the item's filters, with price, condition and a link.
The other commands
/history <item> [days]: the median asking price over 30, 90 or 180 days, drawn as a sparkline. Useful before a trade, to see whether prices are drifting./compare <item1> <item2>: two items side by side. "5800X3D or 7800X3D?" and "grey cart or gold cart?" in one reply./browse [category]: every tracked item, or just the video games or the PC parts./movers: the biggest 90-day asking-price moves, up and down, across all tracked items./check <ebay url or item id>: a red-flag check of one listing, using the same rules as the web eBay listing checker. Handy when someone pastes a link and asks "is this legit?".
Worked examples
For a hardware-swap server (more on the GPU price bot page):
/price rtx 3080: used, refurbished and new asking prices for the RTX 3080 10GB./comparewith the RX 6800 XT and the RTX 3080: AMD against NVIDIA at the same tier./historyfor the RTX 4090 over 180 days: is the asking price sliding?
For a retro collecting server (more on the retro game price bot page):
/price earthbound: loose against CIB, so the cost of the box and manual is right there./historyfor Pokemon Crystal over 90 days before you trade./comparewith Ocarina of Time and the gold cart Ocarina of Time.
Privacy and permissions
Server owners reasonably want to know what a bot can see. This one:
- asks for zero channel permissions (
permissions=0); slash-command replies don't need any; - doesn't use Discord's message content intent, so it can't read ordinary chat;
- never DMs anyone and never posts on its own, only replying to the command that asked;
- reads only public price data, the same as on the deal pages.
What the bot doesn't do: alerts
The bot answers questions. It won't post in your channel when a cheap listing appears. If you want that, it's a different tool: create a CresvaMent search profile with your own keywords, exclusions, price range and condition, and turn on Discord webhook notifications for a channel you choose. The free plan covers one profile with delayed notifications; paid plans ping within about a minute. The full setup, and the alternatives, are in how to get Discord notifications for new eBay listings.
A good combination for a deal-hunting server is both: an alert channel fed by webhooks for the searches you care about, and the bot for "is this a fair price?" when an alert, or a member, turns something up.