Cigar Worth: David Garofalo Launches a Price Guide and History Platform for Premium Cigars
Every cigar lover has had this moment. You open an old humidor, maybe one that belonged to a dad, a granddad or a buddy who moved away, and there’s a box of cigars nobody can quite identify. What year is it? Where was it made? Is it something special, or just old? Until now, getting answers usually meant forum threads, blurry photos and a lot of educated guessing.
David Garofalo wants to change that. The owner of Two Guys Cigars and United Cigars announced Cigar Worth, a price-guide and information platform built just for premium cigars, and it went live at CigarWorth.com on Monday, October 12, 2026. Cigar Journal reported that the project was more than three years in the making and was unveiled during the grand opening of the Selected Tobacco factory in Madrid, Spain.
What Cigar Worth says it is
The announcement bills Cigar Worth as the world’s first valuation platform created for premium cigars. We haven’t found an earlier service built for exactly that job, but “first” is the company’s own claim, so take it as theirs. What’s clear is the pitch. Per the announcement, Cigar Worth “is not a cigar-review website, another online humidor, or simply another cigar app.” Instead, it calls itself “a centralized historical and valuation platform created for cigar enthusiasts, collectors, retailers, auction houses, estates, insurers, and manufacturers.”
The press release leans on a comparison any collector will recognize. In the words quoted by Cigar Coop: “Baseball cards have price guides. Fine wines have provenance. Luxury watches have serial numbers. Classic automobiles have established valuation systems.” Premium cigars, it argues, “have never had a universal valuation.”
That grandfather’s-humidor scenario is actually the example Garofalo’s team uses. Instead of searching Google or debating a cigar’s identity online, the idea is that you could look it up on Cigar Worth and learn when it was produced, where it was made, how rare it may be and what it’s estimated to be worth today.
“Cigar Worth replaces generations of guesswork with organized information and meaningful data,” Garofalo said in the announcement. “For the first time, we are beginning to build a historical record for the premium cigar industry.”
What’s on the site right now
The October launch is Cigar Worth Version 1.0, and Garofalo has stressed that it’s only the first stage. Today the site describes itself as offering grading, market estimates and authentication. Its public price guide lists estimated market values along with a trend marker for each entry, and it says its published prices are sourced rather than guessed. Members also get a dashboard and a digital humidor for logging what they own. Access is sold on a subscription basis, with a short free trial. We aren’t quoting any of the listed values here. Think of them as Cigar Worth’s estimates, not ours.
The big swing: Cigar Fingerprint Technology
The most ambitious part of the plan is still in development. Cigar Worth is working on what it calls Cigar Fingerprint Technology, an authentication system meant to give an individual cigar its own verifiable identity. The vision, as Cigar Journal laid it out, is for a cigar to be scanned and verified at the factory and then documented throughout its lifetime. Because every handmade cigar has its own physical quirks, that data could eventually work like a fingerprint.
The company says the technology “will help combat counterfeiting, prevent false histories from becoming accepted as fact, and create a permanent record for significant premium cigars.” It lists possible benefits for manufacturers, retailers, collectors, auction houses, insurers and estate professionals. To be clear, those are goals the company has described. It hasn’t announced a working rollout yet.
The Cigar Guys take: why this matters to collectors
We love a good cigar story. The trouble is that in this hobby, stories have a way of growing in the retelling. A box picks up a backstory at the lounge, the backstory turns into “fact” online, and before long nobody remembers where it came from. We’ve poked at a few of those legends ourselves, like in Debunking the Myth: Are Cuban Cigars Overrated? and Unveiling the Hidden World of Premium Cigars. A shared, documented record of production details could take a lot of the air out of the tall tales.
Counterfeits are the other half of it. Fake bands, fake boxes and fake provenance have been a headache for years, especially on rare and sought-after cigars. If factory-level authentication ever works the way Cigar Worth describes, it could be a real tool for collectors and the shops that serve them. That’s a big “if,” and it’ll take buy-in from manufacturers to work, but it’s the right problem to go after.
A few friendly reminders while the industry figures this out:
- Age cigars because you love them. Time in a well-kept humidor can round out a blend beautifully. That’s the reward. An estimated value on a website isn’t a promise of what anyone will pay.
- Keep your own records. Write down when and where you got a box, and hang on to the box, bands and any paperwork. Good documentation helps whatever tools come along.
- Be skeptical of great stories. If a cigar’s history sounds too good, ask for proof. That’s the whole point of a platform like this.
If some of the collector lingo is new to you, our Cigar Talk 101 glossary is a good place to start.
What comes next
Coverage so far, from Cigar Journal, Cigar Coop, The Humidor Herald and The Cigar Authority, has mostly passed along the announcement. Whether Cigar Worth becomes the standard reference it’s aiming for will depend on how good its data turns out to be and on whether manufacturers, retailers and auction houses actually use it. The idea of treating top-tier cigars more like documented collectibles is getting attention. We’ll be watching Version 1.0 grow and will let you know how it holds up.
What do you think? Would you look up that mystery box in the back of your humidor? Tell us in the comments.
