Ka-Ching!

This is not a comic collection catalogue. It doesn't track what you own, store cover art, or care about which variant is sitting on your shelf — there are already excellent apps for that. Ka-Ching! answers exactly two questions and nothing else:

• What's due this week, and what will it cost?
• What's my forecast for this month (and next)?

Currency: choose £/$/€ on the Settings page - this changes what's shown everywhere in the app, and the paste-in importer and manual add form both recognise prices in whichever one you pick, so this genuinely works for US and European use, not just UK. The one thing that stays UK-specific regardless of this setting: the two shops with dedicated parsers, Forbidden Planet and eBay, are both built around their UK pages specifically (forbiddenplanet.com, ebay.co.uk) - anywhere else, use the manual add form or the generic paste-in parser, which don't care which shop or currency they're reading.

Not just comics, either. Ka-Ching! doesn't actually check what kind of thing it's tracking - a comic, a hardcover, an action figure, a manga volume, whatever has a name, a price, a release date, and a shop just works, the same way. That's not a deliberately-built feature so much as a natural side effect of never trying to be a specialised comic-only tool - confirmed in practice when a real Forbidden Planet order with hardcovers and Black Series action figures mixed in with the comics imported and tracked exactly the same as everything else, no special handling needed.

Gallery

Click any screenshot to view it full-size.

Dashboard	Calendar
Log Orders — paste-in importing	Search
Insights	Settings

Running in Dockge

Your data is yours

Ka-Ching! runs entirely on your own server, under your own control. There's no account to create, no cloud service sitting in the middle, no analytics, and nothing phones home anywhere — the only network calls it ever makes are ones you explicitly set up yourself (a notification push through ntfy/Gotify/Telegram, if and when you choose to configure one).

Everything you paste in — every order, every price, every shop — lives in one SQLite file on your own machine, and nowhere else. This project doesn't want your data, doesn't have your data, and there's no mechanism by which it ever could. Download backup on the Settings page gives you the whole database as a single file whenever you want it — genuinely yours, not locked into anything.

The logo is a real image (app/static/img/logo.png), not CSS text — doubles as the browser tab favicon too. Swap that file for anything the same rough proportions to change it.

How it works

You paste your retailer's order history page (Forbidden Planet etc.) into the Import page every so often. A parser pulls out item name, release date, price, and charge status, and ignores everything else (addresses, card numbers, pagination). Already-seen items are skipped automatically, so it's safe to re-paste the same page next month — nothing gets double-counted.

The dashboard then shows:

• A still-due total up top for the current month — this is the number that actually matters day to day
• Spent so far and the forecast total alongside it, so you can see spent / remaining / total at a glance
• This year so far — spent vs. tracked total across every issue this year
• This week, grouped by likely shipment
• This month, broken down shipment by shipment, browsable to any month
• A spend trend chart with Week / Month / 6M tabs — each bar is a time bucket (a week, a month), never a single day: Week shows several weeks of totals, Month restores the original view (a handful of months either side of now), and 6M shows just the next 6 months forecast.

Shipping is no longer a flat guess. If you paste in a Forbidden Planet order detail page (the page for one specific order, not the order-history list — its Order Summary shows a "Postage" breakdown with the exact cost of each shipment), Ka-Ching! recognises it as Forbidden Planet and shows every item on the same editable review screen as any other import - name, price, and shop pre-filled - alongside the exact shipping figure(s), which get saved automatically once confirmed. Dispatched items get marked paid automatically; a "Charged" status (payment taken, not yet dispatched) gets marked paid too, without falsely claiming it's shipped. This page type never shows a release date for anything still pending though (just its current status), so that field is left blank for you to fill in if you want it. Once there's enough real shipping data, it's used for your real average. Multiple order-detail pages can be pasted concatenated together in one go. Without any of this, shipping falls back to an approximation from the order-history list (declared total minus item costs, split across shipments), and only falls back further to a flat guess if neither has enough data yet. A note under the hero shows which one it's currently using.

Every item has a small circle next to it — tap it to mark that item paid. Its cost moves from "still due" into "spent" immediately (it stays visible, just dimmed and ticked). Tap the circle again to undo it. There's also a small × next to the price to cancel an item, and a Remove button next to that.

These do different things. Cancel means "this was a real order and it's been cancelled" — it's reversible (an Undo button appears in "Recently cancelled"), and matches what re-importing would show once Forbidden Planet itself marks it cancelled. Remove is a permanent delete, for bad data rather than a real-world event — a duplicate line item that shouldn't exist, or a parsing artifact — and asks for confirmation since there's no undo.

The "still due" number at the top always reflects the real current month. The "by shipment" list below it is separately browsable — use the ← / → arrows either side of the month name to look ahead or back, and "Today" to jump straight back to the current month. Handy for checking a release date actually moved after a Forbidden Planet notification, without waiting for it to become "this month."

Re-pasting your order history later won't undo a manual tick — once you've marked something, that overrides whatever the retailer's page says about it, until you hit Undo.

Duplicate order detection

If the same comic, same release date, ends up tracked under two different order numbers, a warning shows up on the dashboard — this is almost always an accidental double-order rather than two genuinely different things releasing the same day (this is exactly how Ka-Ching! caught a real duplicate order during testing). Each entry gets its own × (cancel) and Remove button, or a "Not a duplicate" button on the group if it's genuinely intentional — dismissing it stops that specific pairing being flagged again.

This only catches duplicates spread across two different order numbers. If the same item shows up twice under the same order number — a genuine double-line-item, not a double-order — it won't trigger this warning, since there's nothing to "cancel" on Forbidden Planet's side. Use Remove directly on the extra line instead.

A note on "ghost" duplicates with no order number

An earlier version of the parser could, in rare cases with very large pastes, lose track of which order it was currently reading partway through (usually a page-break mangling an "Order#" line) and record an item with no order number attached at all. Those orphaned rows never matched the duplicate detector (which compares different order numbers) and never got cleaned up by re-importing (a missing order number can't be matched against anything). If you were tracking a comic and it looked like you owned it twice with only one order to show for it, this was almost certainly why.

How importing actually works now

Pasting an order no longer saves anything straight away. Instead:

1. Ka-Ching! tries to recognise what you pasted, in order: Forbidden Planet's exact format first (the only one that's fully reliable), then eBay's order-detail format (also a real dedicated parser, since eBay's page shape is consistent regardless of seller - detects the order number, seller, total, and every item and price; since these aren't pre-orders, items default to the order's own delivery date, or its placed date if it hasn't been delivered yet, and are marked paid/dispatched automatically if the order shows as delivered. Shipping isn't a guess either - eBay's own Total already includes postage, so subtracting the sum of the items gives the exact amount paid for shipping, feeding straight into that seller's own shipping calibration. A bulk eBay purchase-history paste often contains several separate orders back to back - Ka-Ching! splits these apart automatically, so each item ends up tagged with its own correct seller, order number, and shipping figure rather than everything getting lumped into whichever order happened to be first), then a generic parser built around patterns common to small-shop checkouts generally (most run on shared platforms like Shopify, so confirmations tend to share a recognisable shape - Order Number / itemised list / Subtotal / Shipping / Total - even when the exact wording differs).
2. You land on a review screen showing exactly what it found - name, price, and release date per item, all editable, plus the shop, order number, and shipping if detected. Nothing has been written to the database at this point.
3. Anything it couldn't confidently work out is left blank, never guessed at - an item with only "expected in stock late August" rather than an actual date gets no release date, so you fill that in yourself rather than Ka-Ching! inventing one.
4. Possible duplicates are flagged right on this screen - if something with the same name already exists under a different order number, it's called out before you've committed to anything, not after.
5. Untick anything you don't want, fix anything that's wrong, add a row by hand if something got missed, then confirm. Only then does anything actually get saved.

For a shop Ka-Ching! doesn't recognise as Forbidden Planet, you'll be asked to confirm which shop it's from on the review screen - type it once, and it becomes a known option in the shop dropdown everywhere else in the app from then on. Detected shipping gets stored as that shop's own real shipping figure, feeding into...

Shipping - exact per order first, estimates only as a fallback

Different shops charge different amounts for postage, and - especially on eBay - the same seller can charge completely different shipping from one order to the next, depending on item count, weight, or a free-shipping threshold. Averaging a seller's past orders would be actively misleading here, so it isn't done: whenever the exact postage for a specific order is known (which it always is for a properly-imported eBay order, and for Forbidden Planet order-detail pages with a postage breakdown), that real figure is used directly for that order, immediately - no waiting for several orders to build up an average.

An estimate only ever applies as a fallback, for orders where the real figure genuinely isn't known - Forbidden Planet pre-orders imported from the order-history page alone (no exact postage line), calibrated from that shop's declared order totals once there's enough data, or the flat default if there's nothing to calibrate from yet.

This is also where the review screen mentioned above adds real value - now that a parsing mistake shows up on-screen before anything's saved, rather than needing to be caught after the fact. The exact shipping figure detected for an order shows there too, so it's visible immediately rather than only provable by checking the database.

Running it

docker compose up -d --build

Then visit http://<server-ip>:8091.

Data lives in ./data/kaching.db (SQLite) — back it up like you would any other stack config.

Upgrading from an earlier version

If you already had Ka-Ching! (née Pull Cost) running before, just replace the code and rebuild — your existing tracked comics aren't touched. The database upgrades itself automatically the first time it starts back up (new columns and tables get added as needed), and everything you'd already imported stays exactly as it was.

docker compose up -d --build

Configuration

One environment variable, set in docker-compose.yml:

• SHIPPING_ESTIMATE — flat cost added per distinct release date within a month (default 4.00). Change this to match what your retailer actually charges you per parcel.

Importing your order history

1. Open your retailer's order history page (log in first).
2. Select all the text on the page (or as many pages as you want) and copy it.
3. Paste the whole thing into the textarea on the Import page here and hit Import.
4. Repeat monthly, or whenever you place new pre-orders — duplicates are silently skipped.

The parser is tolerant of pagination artifacts (page breaks that split an item's price across two pages) — if an item's price genuinely gets lost in the copy-paste, that one item is skipped rather than risk recording a wrong figure. Everything else still imports fine.

Re-pasting the same page updates anything that's changed since (e.g. a pre-order that's since shipped and been charged) — unless you've manually ticked Paid or Cancel on it yourself, in which case your tick always wins.

Release-date-change emails

Forbidden Planet emails you separately whenever a pre-order's release date moves — a completely different format to the order-history page (no price, no images, dates written as DD/MM/YYYY). You can paste one of these emails into the same Import box - it's recognised as its own kind of paste, shows a simple review screen listing exactly which item(s) will get which new date, and only updates them once you confirm. Nothing else changes and no new items get added.

This only understands the one email template Forbidden Planet was sending as of when this was built — if they change the wording or you spot one that doesn't get picked up, paste an example and it can be adjusted.

More than one shop

Ka-Ching! only knows how to read Forbidden Planet's pages — it can't parse any other retailer's site. For anything else, use Log Orders in the nav (which also has the paste-in Import box further down the same page). Set the release date and shop once, then add every comic from that same order as its own row (name + price) before submitting — one shipment, one form, rather than repeating the whole form per comic. Click any item's name on the dashboard to edit those same details later, one at a time.

eBay purchases from different sellers share one filter tab. Each seller still gets its own colour and label within the grouped item lists (so you can tell "Sad Lemon Comics" apart from "Bearsgames" at a glance), but the shop filter row shows a single combined "eBay" tab rather than one per seller, which got unwieldy fast. Since eBay orders are typically already paid and delivered, filtering to eBay on the dashboard's forward-looking views (This Week, This Month) will usually turn up nothing due — a note there points to Search instead, which covers your full purchase history across all time.

Notifications

The Settings page sets up a daily check — once a day, Ka-Ching! looks at what's releasing tomorrow and sends a single push through whichever service you configure, grouped by shop, e.g. "Tomorrow: 3 comics, £11.48 — Forbidden Planet: 2 items, £8.49 · Cocktails and Comics: 1 item, £2.99." Stays completely silent on quiet days — no pointless daily pings when nothing's due.

An optional weekly digest can run alongside the daily one - same idea, but covering the next 7 days rather than just tomorrow, sent once a week on whichever day you pick.

Supports ntfy, Gotify, Telegram, or a custom webhook — pick one from the dropdown, fill in its details (server URL + topic for ntfy, server URL + app token for Gotify, bot token + chat ID for Telegram), and set what time of day the check should run.

The custom webhook option covers anything else - Discord, Slack, Home Assistant, Node-RED, a script of your own. Set the URL and a JSON template with {title} and {message} placeholders, and Ka-Ching! POSTs that payload whenever it would otherwise notify you - no native integration code needed for whatever service you actually want to use.

Two buttons let you confirm it's actually working before relying on it:

• Send test notification — an immediate, generic ping, just to prove the connection details are right
• Test tomorrow's digest now — sends the real message you'd get tomorrow (or "nothing releasing" on a quiet day), without waiting for the scheduled time

This all runs inside the container itself — no cron job to set up, no external scheduler. It just needs the container running once a day at the time you pick.

A few smaller extras

• Collapsible sections — This Week and By Shipment can be collapsed on the dashboard; Calendar's daily release list is a per-day accordion that auto-expands the nearest upcoming date, and tapping a day in the grid jumps straight to (and opens) its details below.
• Action menu — cancel and remove tuck behind a small "⋮" toggle per row, on every screen size, rather than always sitting there taking up space and inviting an accidental tap. The bulk-select checkbox stays visible outside it though, so selecting several items doesn't mean opening each row's menu just to reach it. Click anywhere outside an open menu (or open a different one) and it closes on its own.
• Log Orders (renamed from "+ Add") — Paste Invoice / Manual Entry tabs, optional order number and shipping cost fields on the manual form (feeds straight into that shop's exact shipping figure), quick-select shop hints above the paste box, and the manual form's shop field remembers whichever shop you actually used last, rather than always defaulting to the same one.
• Search — find any comic you've ever tracked, filterable by shop, paid status, a custom date range, or a min/max price range, with sort options (including a "recently added" one, handy right after a big import) and a running total (spent / still due) for whatever's currently filtered, not locked to the current week or month like the dashboard. Matches order numbers and shop names too, not just comic titles; This Month/This Year quick date buttons, plus one-click "Most expensive"/"Cheapest" shortcuts; clicking an order number in a result isolates every other item from that same order.
• Live calendar subscription — "Subscribe (live)" alongside the .ics download, for calendar apps that support an updating feed rather than a one-off file.
• More Settings: currency selection (£/$/€, changes the display and what the importer recognises everywhere), notification quiet-days toggle (stay silent or send a health-check ping), budget cycle (monthly/weekly/28-day) with optional rollover of unused budget, default landing page preference, automatic daily backups (last 7 kept), and a factory reset (type-to-confirm, wipes tracked items only - settings are kept).
• Mobile bottom nav bar — single row, thumb-reach, instead of wrapping onto two lines.
• Tracking number — optional field on the manual add/edit forms, and auto-filled from eBay imports (it's already sitting right there in the order text). The number itself is a link - clicking it copies the number and opens PostTrack.com's tracking page in one go, so it's usually already sitting on the clipboard the moment you land there.
• Release date change tracking — when a re-import shows a different release date for something already tracked (Forbidden Planet does this often), a note appears on your next dashboard visit: which comic, old date, new date.
• Insights page — most expensive month ever, priciest single issue tracked, total issues tracked, average spend per month and per issue, pre-order vs released split, shipping as a percentage of cover price, next month's forecast so far, average shipping per month, the busiest release day of the week, the biggest and cheapest single shipping charge ever actually captured, money saved by cancelling, top 3 most expensive titles, a 12-month rolling spend trend, and spend by shop across all time, each shop's real shipping worked in the same exact-first way as everywhere else. eBay sellers are grouped into one row (same as everywhere else in the app) - click it to expand and see each seller's own individual total.
• Shop filter on the Calendar page — same filter tabs as the dashboard, carried through month navigation so switching months doesn't reset it.
• Monthly budget bar — set a target on the Settings page and the dashboard shows a progress bar for how close this month's forecast total is to it, colour-shifting from green to amber to pink as you approach or pass it. Leave it blank to hide the bar entirely.
• CSV export — a "Download CSV" button on the Search page exports whatever's currently filtered (same name/shop/status/date-range filters) as a spreadsheet-ready file.
• All-time totals — alongside "this year so far" on the dashboard, there's now a lifetime total across everything ever tracked.
• Data backup and restore — a "Download backup" button on the Settings page gives you the whole database as a single file, separate from GitHub (which never sees your real order data). A matching "Restore backup" upload puts it back — it checks the file is genuinely a Ka-Ching database before touching anything, and automatically keeps a safety copy of whatever was live just before a restore (sitting in /data as kaching.db.before-restore-<timestamp>, not shown in the UI, but there if a restore ever needs undoing manually). Database size and item count show on the same Settings page, next to the backup button. A separate "Download full spend history (CSV)" button exports everything ever tracked as a plain spreadsheet, for opening elsewhere rather than restoring into Ka-Ching! itself; notification setup can also be exported and re-imported on its own, handy when moving to a new server without needing a full database backup for just that.
• Install to home screen — Ka-Ching! can be added to your phone's home screen like a normal app (look for "Add to Home Screen" or an install icon in your browser). Still the same container underneath, just opens full-screen with its own icon instead of a browser tab.
• Awaiting charge — a dashboard warning for anything whose release date has already passed but is still sitting unpaid and unmarked. Usually just a normal short delay before the retailer charges, but worth a look if something's been sitting there a while.
• Your place is kept — marking something paid, cancelling, removing an item, or browsing to a different month all return you to exactly where you were - same section, same month, same search filters - rather than bouncing back to the top of the page or today's date every time.
• Bulk select — a small checkbox on every item (dashboard and search) lets you select several at once; a toolbar appears with Mark paid, Cancel, and Remove, applying to everything selected in one go instead of one click-confirm-reload cycle per item.
• Chart tabs switch instantly — Week/Month/6M all load at once (hidden until picked), so switching between them happens right in the browser with no reload and no lost scroll position. Your last-picked range is also remembered between visits.
• Spend trend chart — a smooth gradient area for total spend (comics + shipping, matching the hero's own figures exactly), with a second thin bar strip beneath showing how many comics released each period. Hover any point for the exact breakdown - comics, shipping, total, and item count. Hand-built in plain SVG, so it works with no internet connection and no external library, same as everything else here.

Once more than one shop is being tracked, a small filter row appears above "This week" (All shops / each shop by name), and any day with releases from more than one place shows each shop labelled separately with its own colour, rather than one undifferentiated pile — so a Wednesday with both a Forbidden Planet delivery and a Cocktails & Comics order due shows clearly which is which.

If something looks wrong

Every action that changes an item's status or release date — clicking the paid circle, cancelling, undoing, a re-import refreshing something, a release-date email updating something — gets logged, along with the exact before/after state. If a duplicate warning reappears, or anything else looks like it silently changed on its own, check:

docker logs kaching

Look for lines starting MARK request, MARK result, IMPORT REFRESH, EMAIL DATE UPDATE, or DUPLICATE CHECK — between them they show exactly what happened to a given item and when, rather than needing to reconstruct it from memory afterwards.

There's also a standing check on the dashboard for items tagged Forbidden Planet with no order number at all — always a parser artifact from an earlier version, never legitimate, since every real Forbidden Planet item comes with an order number attached. If any show up under "Items with no order number", they're almost certainly duplicates of something already tracked properly; check before removing.

Calendar view and export

The Calendar tab shows a compact month grid — release days are highlighted with that day's total and issue count, kept deliberately simple since a full title list doesn't fit a calendar cell without turning into a mess. Full detail (every item, with the same tap-to-pay circles and cancel × as the dashboard) lives in the "releases" list underneath the grid. Navigate month to month the same way as the dashboard's shipment view.

The Download .ics button exports every upcoming (non-cancelled) release as a calendar file, one event per release day rather than one per variant, so importing it into Google Calendar, Apple Calendar, or Outlook doesn't flood your calendar with near-duplicate entries. Only upcoming releases are included, not your whole history, so it stays useful as a "what's coming out" reminder rather than a log of everything you've ever ordered.

Optional: a weekly/monthly nudge via ntfy

The app exposes a small JSON endpoint at /api/summary:

{
  "week_total": 27.88,
  "week_item_count": 3,
  "month_total_estimate": 72.88,
  "month_item_count": 9,
  "month": "May 2026"
}

scripts/ntfy-digest.sh wraps this into an ntfy push. It needs curl and jq (Aegis likely already has both; otherwise apt install jq).

export NTFY_TOPIC=kaching           # required
export KACHING_URL=http://192.168.0.178:8091   # default shown, override if needed
export NTFY_URL=https://ntfy.sh     # default shown, point at your own ntfy server if self-hosted

./scripts/ntfy-digest.sh weekly     # "This week: £27.88 across 3 issue(s)."
./scripts/ntfy-digest.sh monthly    # "May 2026 forecast: £72.88 across 9 issue(s), incl. est. shipping."

Suggested crontab, run from wherever the script lives (e.g. alongside your other scheduled jobs on Aegis - the folder path below is whatever this actually lives in on your server):

0 8 * * 1   NTFY_TOPIC=kaching /opt/stacks/kaching/scripts/ntfy-digest.sh weekly
0 8 1 * *   NTFY_TOPIC=kaching /opt/stacks/kaching/scripts/ntfy-digest.sh monthly

This is left as a script you run yourself, rather than built into the container, so the container keeps doing exactly one job — serving the dashboard — reliably.

What this deliberately doesn't do

• No collection cataloguing, no barcode scanning, no cover art
• No accounts, no cloud, no analytics, no telemetry of any kind
• No login/auth — put it behind your existing reverse proxy (NPM/Authelia) the same way as everything else, since it has no auth of its own
• No automatic scraping of the retailer site — paste-in only, so nothing breaks silently when a retailer changes their page markup

It's a small, honest tool that does one job on hardware you own, with data that never leaves it.

Contributing a new shop's parser

Ka-Ching! only knows how to reliably read Forbidden Planet and eBay, because those are the two that have actually been built and tested against real orders. If you shop somewhere else and want that shop supported too, that's genuinely welcome — but it has to start from a real example, not a guess, since retailer pages are full of small surprises no one would think to account for in advance.

The right way to contribute one: take a real order confirmation or order-history page from that shop, and manually replace anything personal — your name, address, card details, real order numbers, real dates — with made-up values, while keeping the actual page structure, wording, and layout exactly as it really appears. The structure is what a parser is built from; none of it depends on the content being real. Then open a GitHub issue with that sanitised example and a note on what shop it's from.

This is deliberately a manual, human step rather than an automated "share my data" button. An automated redaction tool can miss things a person reviewing their own paste wouldn't - a stray reference number, something unexpected in a link - and Ka-Ching!'s whole point is that nothing about it ever has an automated path for data to leave your server, even a well-intentioned one. A hand-sanitised example keeps that promise intact while still giving enough to build from.

If you're comfortable writing the parser yourself, pull requests work the same way - just make sure any example text included with it is sanitised the same way first.

AI involvement

Ka-Ching! was built through heavy, iterative collaboration with an LLM (Claude). A lot of the actual code came out of that process rather than being hand-typed line by line - but every feature, every parser, and every decision about what this should and shouldn't do was directed and made by a real person, not generated and shipped unchecked.

In practice that meant: every parser here was built from a real, messy, copy-pasted example rather than a guessed-at format, tested against actual orders before being trusted, and fixed properly (sometimes across several rounds) when real data revealed something a reasonable guess wouldn't have caught. Scope decisions - what Ka-Ching! does and deliberately doesn't do, the licence, what got rejected outright - were all real calls made by a person, not defaults left unquestioned.

Happy to go into more detail on the actual process if anyone's curious - open an issue.

Licence

All rights reserved, for now. This code is public on GitHub so you can read it, learn from it, and see exactly what it does with your data - but there's no open-source licence attached at the moment, so reusing, modifying, or redistributing it isn't permitted without asking first. This is a deliberate choice while it's actively maintained, not an oversight.

If time to maintain it actively becomes harder to find down the line, the plan is to open it up properly under AGPL-3.0 - a licence that still allows forks and contributions, but requires anyone who modifies and runs their own version (including as a hosted service) to keep it open source too, rather than it quietly becoming someone else's closed, rebranded product.