About

What it is

Guitar serial numbers are scattered across manufacturer support articles, dealer blogs, decades-old forum threads, and an increasingly thin stock of printed references. The information exists; finding the right piece of it when you're holding an instrument usually doesn't. This is an attempt to consolidate it.

Type a serial, pick a brand (or let the decoder guess), optionally add the listing year and a model hint, and you get the format, the decoded year when the format encodes one, and a confidence tier that reflects how sure the decoder is.

How it runs

The decoder is pure TypeScript — @guitarserials/core, published on npm, zero runtime dependencies. The site is a static Astro build with no backend.

Privacy, stated plainly

No analytics. No cookies. No tracking. No account. By design — not by oversight. The page loads static HTML + CSS + a small React bundle for the decoder, plus web fonts from Google Fonts. That is the entire network footprint. Every decode is a pure function of the text you paste; nothing is uploaded, logged, or shared.

If you want to verify: the only third-party origin the site contacts is fonts.gstatic.com for the font files. Block it if you prefer system fonts — the site still works.

How the rules get here

Every format rule traces to at least two authoritative sources — manufacturer documentation where it exists, then reference books, curated registries, and long-running community wikis. Every rule has unit tests. The details are in the methodology.

Contributing

Spotted a wrong decode? Know a brand or format worth adding? Open an issue — or better, a pull request — at github.com/onemorepereira/guitarserials.org. New formats need two authoritative citations and a test per rule; CONTRIBUTING.md has the specifics.

License

MIT. Use it, fork it, embed the decoder library in your own dealer tool or appraisal workflow — attribution is appreciated but not required.