3 min read
Zac AckerI collect things. Comics, vinyl, baseball cards, diecasts, Pokémon cards, books. I've been doing it my whole life and I've never once found an app that made cataloging feel like anything other than homework.
Most of them want you to create an account, hand over your data, and spend fifteen minutes poking around a UI designed by someone who has never actually collected anything. The good ones cost money every month for features that should've shipped on day one. The great ones got acquired and then quietly gutted.
So I built collect.
It's an iOS app. You add stuff you own. You take some photos. It doesn't send your data to a server I'm running, because I don't have one. That's genuinely the whole pitch.
What's in it
Tile-based dashboard. Category and tag breakdowns. Multi-image items. Up to three reference links per entry. Favorites, wishlist, archive, trash. Separate personal and business vaults if you're keeping those lives apart.
Search is fast. Lists are filterable and sortable. Tags and categories drill down across every view without making you wait.
Data portability actually works: CSV and JSON import with duplicate detection, CSV and JSON export with formula-injection protection. Your stuff is yours. You can get it out whenever you want, in a format a human can read.
There's a stats view for seeing the shape of your collection at a glance. You can export any item as a share card or as raw JSON, which is more useful than it sounds when you're trying to settle a disagreement about condition grades with someone on the internet.
The part about privacy
Your catalog lives on device with Core Data and syncs through your own iCloud account via CloudKit. I'm not storing it anywhere. The whole app locks behind Face ID, Touch ID, or a passphrase, with brute-force protection and an auth challenge before any lock change. Content is hidden in the app switcher by default.
None of this should be a selling point in 2026. And yet.
Where it stands
collect. is in open beta right now for iPhone. Core catalog is feature-complete. I'm polishing before 1.0.
If you collect anything and want an app that treats that like a normal thing a person would want to do, grab the beta at acker.cloud/collect. Tell me what's broken.