Problem

Miniswap addresses the friction of buying, selling, and trading tabletop wargaming miniatures through informal exchange forums and generic marketplaces. The existing process can involve lengthy direct-message negotiations, manually arranging shipping, and juggling payment methods; broad platforms also lack the specialist catalogue, provenance, and search tools that collectors and players need. The main use case is finding and transacting for new or used miniatures—initially especially Warhammer 40,000 and related games—in a way that makes hobby-specific price discovery and fulfillment easier.

The economics are marketplace-driven: sellers pay a 7% fee only when an item sells, with no listing fee, which Miniswap positions as cheaper than eBay. This gives sellers a lower-cost specialist alternative while giving buyers a more structured way to find niche items, including individual models, kits, and “bits” that are difficult to search for on general-purpose platforms.

Product / Service

Miniswap is a vertical two-sided marketplace built by hobbyists for tabletop gamers. It combines an extensive miniature catalogue with hobby-specific categories, filters, and search; integrated payments and shipping; and buyer and seller protections. Sellers can create listings with catalogue data auto-filled, import inventory from eBay or upload it by CSV, and use prepaid tracked labels in supported countries. Buyers can browse and purchase from a structured inventory rather than coordinating every transaction through private messages.

The service is delivered as an online marketplace with transaction-based monetization. Its benefit is to compress the work involved in listing, discovering, paying for, shipping, and resolving problems with miniature transactions, while creating a permanent specialist home for the community. Miniswap supports sellers across 34 countries and handles payment collection, seller payouts, shipping workflows, and certain domestic lost-parcel and return escalations.

Market

Miniswap competes in vertical e-commerce and consumer marketplaces for tabletop games and collectibles. Y Combinator describes the broader tabletop-games market as approximately $20 billion in 2025 and says Warhammer alone is projected to reach $3 billion by 2030. The direct alternatives include eBay and informal mini-exchange forums; Miniswap differentiates through domain-specific taxonomy, catalogue data, search, valuation and provenance-oriented tooling, and community features rather than generic marketplace scale. Its longer-term positioning is to extend the same model into other complex hobby and collector categories.

The company is active and has early marketplace traction rather than being merely pre-launch. Its site says more than 10,000 hobbyists have joined, while its Y Combinator profile reported 1,000 gamers and more than $40,000 of listed inventory four weeks after launch. Miniswap was founded in 2025, participated in Y Combinator’s Fall 2025 batch, and raised approximately $3.5 million in December 2025. The 7% transaction fee establishes a revenue model, but the available evidence does not disclose revenue, GMV, or profitability, so the business should be viewed as an early-stage, funded marketplace with demonstrated user and supply acquisition rather than a proven scaled-revenue company.