Building a TCG Price Tracker with Selenium and Kubernetes
TL;DR Cardboard is a TCG price tracker that monitors sealed product prices across 10 trading card games. It scrapes TCGPlayer and eBay using a three-tier strategy: pure API calls for bulk data, headless Selenium for product pages, and non-headless Selenium with a virtual display for sites that actively detect headless browsers. The scrapers run as Kubernetes Jobs on the same k3s cluster from Cluster Genesis. A Flask dashboard with Chart.js renders historical price data, profit/loss calculations, and portfolio tracking. All scraping is intentionally rate-limited to match normal human browsing patterns – the goal is polite data collection, not stress testing someone else’s infrastructure. ...