Welcome to IsItGOLD?: your AI-powered metal expert
What the app does, where it came from, and what an estimate is and is not.
Marcel Buth · Co-founder, IsItGOLD?
· 3 min read
IsItGOLD? turns your phone camera into a metal expert. You photograph a piece of jewellery, a coin, a bit of scrap or something you dug up, and within seconds you get the metal it probably is, roughly how pure it is likely to be, and an estimated value range based on today's spot price.
What used to mean a trip to the jeweller is now a photo.
Where the app came from
The idea started in 2020, with two people and one recurring question: what is this actually worth?
Marcel Buth, co-founder, has spent decades working with precious metals, including published work on identifying and recovering them. Marvin Buth built the software side. From 2023, AI as a cloud service made it affordable to put that experience into an app instead of a workshop.
That combination is the point. IsItGOLD? is not a general-purpose image classifier with gold in the prompt. It is a product shaped around what someone with thirty years of metal experience actually looks at first.
What a scan gives you
A guided scan walks you through it: add a few photos of the same object, review the summary, then choose your analysis depth — STANDARD or ULTIMATE.
The result contains:
- The metal your object most likely is, with a confidence indicator and the reasoning behind it
- An estimated purity
- An estimated value range, calculated against current precious-metal prices, which we fetch daily
- Other possibilities the analysis considered, so you can see what else it weighed
You can add the weight and a short description yourself. Both make the estimate meaningfully better, and weight in particular changes the value range more than anything else you can provide.
What it is not
An estimate is not a promise. We say "about", "estimated" and "based on today's spot price" because that is what the numbers are. A photo-based analysis cannot establish purity on its own, and it is not an appraisal. If authenticity or a significant sale depends on the answer, have the item tested independently.
We would rather tell you that plainly than have you find it out from the first offer that comes in under the range.
Where you can use it
IsItGOLD? runs on iPhone, on Android, and in your browser at app.isit.gold. The interface is available in eight languages: English, German, French, Spanish, Arabic, Hindi, Chinese (Simplified) and Afrikaans.
If you would rather not sign up yet, the free Value Checker takes one photo and gives you an estimated range with no account at all. Every new confirmed account starts with five free scans.
What you can do with a result
Keep it in your scan history, filter it, export a single scan as a PDF report or your whole history as CSV. Share a result with a short link, which shows a preview in WhatsApp, iMessage and similar apps — a scan only becomes visible to anyone else if you choose to share it.
If a result raises more questions than it answers, Ask karat is a chat on the result itself. Use it to work out which check to make next.
Start with one object and a few clear photos. The rest of this blog is mostly about getting those photos right, because that is the part that changes your results most.
