Why cataloguing stalls
Nobody abandons a collection app because it lacks features. They abandon it at entry eleven, because typing brand, line, vitola, wrapper, country and strength six times in a row is tedious, and a box of twenty-five is twenty-five of those.
The scanner exists to get past that. It does not make the record better — it makes the record exist.
How it works
1. Point, or pick
Open the scanner from the collection toolbar and point the camera at the band. You can also choose an existing photo, which is useful for cigars already in the humidor with the band still on.
2. Cedar reads the band
It identifies what it can from the band artwork and text, and returns the brand and line along with a confidence score — shown as a percentage, so you know how much to trust it before you look.
3. You confirm
The result opens the normal add-cigar form, pre-filled. Every field is editable and nothing is written to your collection until you save. In practice a good scan turns a minute of typing into a glance and a tap; a poor one still saves you the brand and line.
4. Add the purchase details
Quantity, price and which humidor it is going into are yours to enter, because no scanner can know them. That becomes the first lot, with its aging clock starting the day it goes in.
What it will and will not get right
Clean, current bands from well-known houses are the easy case. Worn bands, partial bands, unusual regional releases and anything where the artwork is more decorative than descriptive are harder, and the confidence score will say so.
Cedar is deliberately not designed as an identification oracle. It is a data entry shortcut with a human check at the end — which is why the form always opens rather than saving silently.
Free scans and Pro
The free tier includes five band scans. Cedar Pro makes them unlimited, with no monthly cap — a genuinely unmetered allowance rather than a large number.
Adding cigars by hand is unlimited on every tier. The scanner is a convenience, never a gate on your own records.