Custom products are a Pro and Premium feature. Once you've got access, they sit alongside the built-in catalog and behave the same way in nearly every respect — same product picker, same melt math, same Holdings treatment, same Analytics roll-up.
The two real differences are tier-level access (Starter doesn't get them) and the thumbnail (custom products fall back to a default image rather than carrying a curated product photo). This article covers both, plus the privacy rules.
Access by tier
Custom products are gated by subscription tier:
Starter: No custom products. The My Custom Items tab still appears on the Catalog page, but the + New Custom Item button is unavailable. Starter accounts work with the built-in catalog only.
Pro: Full access. Create as many custom products as you need.
Premium: Full access. Same as Pro.
If you're on Starter and the catalog doesn't have a product you want to record — a smaller-refiner bar, a regional coin, a non-US junk silver entry — the upgrade path is Settings → Subscription.
The jump from Starter to Pro also unlocks the multi-portfolio workflow and lifts the inventory and transaction caps significantly. See [Upgrading your subscription] for proration and timing.
If you downgrade from Pro or Premium back to Starter with custom products already in place, the products themselves stay — your existing inventory items keep pointing at them, and the melt math keeps working — but you won't be able to create new custom products until you upgrade again.
See Downgrading your subscription for the full set of downgrade behaviors.
Privacy: custom products are private to your account
Every custom product you create is scoped to your account. That means:
No one else sees your custom products. They don't appear in anyone else's catalog, even if you've named your custom "American Gold Eagle 1 oz" identically to the built-in entry.
They don't get promoted into the standard catalog. What you've added stays in your My Custom Items tab. Building the shared catalog is a deliberate, curated process — your custom entries are useful for your records but aren't a contribution path.
The Notes field is private too. Anything you write in there is visible only to you.
Bulk import slugs are namespaced to your account. When you reference a custom product in a CSV import, the slug you set resolves against your own custom products, not anyone else's. See Preparing your CSV.
There's no separate cap on how many custom products you can create. What limits you in practice is your inventory and transaction allowance for the tier, since a custom product is only useful when you've recorded something against it.
See Portfolio limits explained and [The three plans compared: Starter, Pro, Premium] for the relevant tier caps.
The one visible difference: thumbnails
The other place a custom product differs from a catalog product is the product image. Built-in catalog entries ship with curated photos — a real American Gold Eagle on the Gold Eagle row, a real Britannia on the Britannia row, and so on.
Custom products fall back to a default image chosen by the product's metal and form combination:
Gold coins show a gold Solidus.
Silver coins show a default silver coin image.
Gold bars show a default gold bar image.
Silver bars and rounds show their respective default silver bar / round images.
Platinum and palladium products show their corresponding fallback images.
The fallback is the same image for every custom product of that metal-and-form combination, which means three different custom gold coins in your collection will all share the same Solidus thumbnail on your Holdings page.
If that matters for visual recognition — say you want to tell two custom gold coins apart at a glance — the workaround is to give each one a distinct nickname, which appears alongside the product name in the card view. See Adding a nickname to a specific item.
The ability to add images to custom products is on the roadmap.
In every other respect — value calculation, search behaviour, filter behaviour, sort behaviour, CSV export, Annual Report (Premium) — custom products and catalog products are interchangeable.
Where to go next
Creating a custom product: The form walkthrough.
When to use a custom product instead of the catalog: The decision rule for picking between the two.
Editing or deactivating a custom product: Managing custom products after the fact.
Upgrading your subscription: For Starter users who need custom-product access.
Adding a nickname to a specific item: The workaround for distinguishing visually-similar custom products.