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Zwaptz
A couple sit together on a sofa in a lamplit sitting room, both laughing as they look at a phone one of them is holding, with mugs and books on the coffee table in front of them.

05  ·  of five

Try it before you back it

Most campaigns ask you to imagine something that does not exist yet. This one is already running — open Zwaptz on the phone you are holding and photograph something in the room you are sitting in.

Try it on something now
Goal
$8,000, all or nothing.
Length
Thirty days at most.
Delivery
One week after the campaign closes.
$8,000

The goal. All or nothing — at $7,999 nobody is charged.

Why the goal is small

Small on purpose.

$8,000 is what it takes to finish the things below and run them for a first year. Kickstarter is all or nothing, so a goal set higher than the work needs is a way of losing a campaign that would otherwise have succeeded.

The expensive part already happened. What is left is specific.

Where every dollar goes

Two lines are arithmetic and you can check them. The rest are marked TK because they are not costed yet, and a plausible-looking number in a funding breakdown is worse than an obvious hole.

Kickstarter’s fee

5% of the total raised, charged only if the campaign funds.

$400
Payment processing

3% plus 30 cents a pledge, shown at eighty backers.

$264
Left to allocate

$8,000 less both fees. This is what the lines below are drawn from.

$7,336
Development

Group trades, and meeting places built from real facts.

TK— still to come: not costed yet
Server migration

Onto a machine sized for more than a demonstration.

TK— still to come: not costed yet
Hosting

The machine itself, for a first year.

TK— still to come: not costed yet
Backups

Off-site storage. Today every copy sits on the machine it protects.

TK— still to come: not costed yet
AI inference

What each valuation costs, multiplied by a year of them.

TK— still to come: not costed yet
Marketing

Reaching people who have something to trade near each other.

TK— still to come: not costed yet

The full breakdown is on funds.

What gets built, in order

  1. 01

    Comparable sales

    built, not connected

    It makes every valuation on the site better at once. Nothing else on this list changes as many screens.

  2. 02

    Group trades

    not built yet

    It removes the last reason a swap fails to happen, and there is no code behind it today.

  3. 03

    Meeting places from facts

    not built yet

    Arranging where to meet is where two people give up and move to another app.

  4. 04

    Being able to reach you

    built, not connected

    No mail server means no password reset and no notification when somebody offers.

  5. 05

    Backups that leave the building

    built, not connected

    Seven days of backups currently sit on the machine they protect.

Timings are counted from the campaign closing, and the launch date is not set — see the roadmap.

No tier buys anything

What backing gets you

Nothing ships in a box. What can be offered is a permanent record of who was here first: your name on the credits page, a mark on your profile, and the build log — a written account of how this was actually made.

No tier buys extra appraisals, a lower fee, early access or a faster queue. Kickstarter’s rules bar service-based offerings, and a backer with a better valuation would be a thumb on the scale a swap depends on.

Prices and stretch amounts are not set. The structure is on rewards.

Tier prices
TK— still to come: not set
Stretch goals
TK— still to come: amounts and what they bring forward
Launch date
TK— still to come: not set
Who is behind it
TK— still to come: creator biography still to write

One week

Seven days from the campaign closing to backers being on the new machine. It can be a week because nothing is manufactured and nothing is posted.

Days 1–4
Move to a machine sized for people rather than for a demonstration.
Days 5–6
Backups off the machine they protect — then actually restoring from one.
Day 7
Live for backers. Names on the credits page, build log sent as a document.

Day by day on delivery.

What is honestly unsettled

Whether Kickstarter accepts a project like this. Their prohibited list rules out spaces built around selling, and although Zwaptz sells nothing and takes no cut, we are not the ones who decide and it has not been put to them. Nothing on this site assumes the answer.

A valuation can be wrong, and while comparable sales are unconnected two appraisals of the same photograph can differ noticeably. There is no way to email you yet. Some items on Explore are seeded examples and say so.

All of it, at length, on questions.

The most useful thing you can do before deciding is not to read another page. Photograph something in the room you are in and see whether the number it gives you is any good.

The longer versions