Membership is the paid tier of NihontoWatch. Members read the market on its live clock: a new piece reaches your feed and your alerts as soon as our crawlers find it, and you get the collection vault to catalogue what you own.

It costs ¥15,600 a year (tax included). Outside Japan, $99 a year.

The free feed will follow 48 hours behind. A piece listed on a Tuesday morning will enter free browse, free search results and free alerts on the Thursday morning.

This is a service level, the same idea as live versus delayed market data, a distinction the financial world has lived with comfortably for fifty years. Nothing is blurred, nothing is hidden, and no listing is ever withheld from you. When a piece reaches your feed you get all of it.

The speed of the feed, and only that. A free account keeps everything it has today; membership reads the same market on its live clock.

In practice that means the whole catalogue, every filter and search, unlimited saved searches and follows, alerts with their full content, the weekly digest, every listing page.

Watching around eighty dealer catalogues in two languages, around the clock, is the part of this service that takes real work and real money to keep running. Membership funds that watch, and members read it at full speed.

To be plain about it: free accounts are not a cost we are trying to recover. They are most of the reason the site exists.

Continuously. Our crawlers sweep every dealer catalogue many times a day, around the clock, and a second pass re-checks pieces we already know about for price changes and sales.

In practice a new piece is usually in the members’ feed within a few hours of the dealer publishing it. We would rather say "many times a day" than quote an interval we cannot promise on every catalogue. Some sites are slow, some go down, and honesty about that is worth more than a tidy number.

Yes, always. Listing pages are public and immediate for everyone: member, free account, or not signed in at all. A link from a friend, a forum thread or a search engine works the moment the piece exists.

Only discovery runs on the feed clock. The piece itself is never locked.

Yes. Free alerts arrive complete: the piece, the photographs, the price, the link to the gallery. They will arrive on the free feed’s clock, and each one will tell you plainly when the piece was listed and when it reached you.

Member alerts run on the continuous clock: they go out with the next alert cycle, which is a quarter of an hour at most.

¥15,600 a year, tax included. Outside Japan, $99 a year.

It is deliberately a small sum beside what the pieces cost. Watching this market properly means crawling 85 dealers continuously and someone minding it, and the membership is meant to cover that and not much more. We would rather be the service a collector keeps for years without thinking about it than one that has to be argued for at every renewal.

NihontoWatch is an independent service. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to the NBTHK or any other appraisal body.

Founding members are the collectors who join during the opening window. They pay the same ¥15,600 as everybody else, with no founding discount, but that rate is locked for as long as their membership stays active, while later members will pay more as the service grows.

If they wish, they are also named on the founding members page. Nobody is listed unless they switch it on.

At any time, from your profile. There is no minimum term and no cancellation fee. Your membership simply runs to the end of the period you have already paid for.

No, and no. There are no advertisements anywhere on the site, and we do not sell member data. A dealer can see a collector’s profile only if that collector has switched it on themselves.

On the collector side, membership is the entire business model. That is deliberate: it keeps our incentives pointed at you rather than at whoever would pay for your attention.