Who builds this
A free LEGO® catalogue, and a place to keep what you own.
Look up any set, see every piece it is made of, and find out what copies of it have actually sold for. Keep a record of the ones on your shelf — their condition, your photos, what you paid. BrickDb is built by ThreeB IT GmbH, and you need no account to look around.
BrickDb was built by Thimo Buchheister, a computer scientist from Ibbenbüren in north-west Germany, who works on it together with his wife Andrea; she does most of its social media and community work. It is operated today by ThreeB IT GmbH — the small software company he runs together with Thorsten Brügge, working mostly in .NET, Azure and DevOps. Thimo always kept the LEGO® bricks of his childhood; at 18 a single LEGO® Technic set bought on holiday in Denmark ended his dark ages, and the collection grew from there. A few years later, at LEGOLAND® Billund, Andrea thought the Collectible Minifigures were silly and talked him out of a heavily discounted box. He still teases her about it: today she is one of the series' biggest fans, and the two of them own nearly every one there is.
It began with a shelf and a spreadsheet, and then a whole room. During the pandemic Thimo and Andrea gave up their living room and made it a LEGO® room to build in and show the collection; the collection has since outgrown that room too, and part of it is kept in a larger, rented storage space. The tools online were either full of ads, or you needed several that were not connected, or they did not look and feel modern. And a spreadsheet holds what you own; it cannot tell you that one set number covers four copies in four conditions, that the second one is missing three pieces, or what any of them is worth this month. BrickDb is an attempt to answer those questions in one place, without asking anybody to sign up before they are allowed to look.
Three decisions shape everything else. The unit of ownership is a copy, not a set — three copies of one set in three conditions are three records, because that is what they are. Condition is a profile rather than a grade, so a sealed box and a complete-but-well-played-with build are not the same thing said twice. And a price is never a single number: it arrives with the band around it, the number of sales behind it, and the window those sales fall in. A median over two sales and a median over two hundred look identical once the figure has been separated from where it came from.
BrickDb is an unofficial, fan-made collection manager for LEGO® sets, parts and minifigs. It helps you catalogue what you own, in what condition, and what it's worth — the LEGO Group neither produces nor endorses it, and it has no official relationship with the LEGO Group.
