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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

What exists today, and what $8,000 finishes

Zwaptz is a working prototype. It is not open to the public and nothing on it is for sale. What it does today is photograph to range in twenty seconds; what it cannot do yet is the reason for this campaign.

Try the prototype
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 release them as Zwaptz version one. 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, and none of it is a year of running a company.

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
Building the two unfinished features

Comparable sales connected to the valuation, and meeting places built from real facts.

TK— still to come: not costed yet
Moving the prototype onto the release machine

Onto a machine sized for more than a demonstration.

TK— still to come: not costed yet
The release environment

Where version one is staged, tested and released, for the build and delivery period.

TK— still to come: not costed yet
Off-site backup, built and proved

Built into version one and then restored from. Today every copy sits on the machine it protects.

TK— still to come: not costed yet
Model and inference during the build

Every valuation run while the engine is built, tuned and tested.

TK— still to come: not costed yet
The pre-release testing round

A structured test of version one with real people on real objects before it opens.

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

    built

    It removes the last reason a swap fails to happen. It shipped a month before this campaign closes, funded or not.

  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 reply when you report something.

  5. 05

    Backups that leave the building

    built, not connected

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

Timings are counted from the campaign closing on Thursday 8 October 2026 — see the roadmap for what each one involves.

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.

Tier prices are not set. Both stretch amounts are, on rewards.

Tier prices
TK— still to come: not set
Stretch goal
$12,000 brings meeting places forward, from six months after version one to landing with it.
Launch date
Opened Tuesday 8 September 2026. Runs thirty days and closes Thursday 8 October 2026.
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