Point your phone at it

Point your phone at the thing you stopped using.

Find out what it is worth. Trade it for something you actually want. Twenty seconds from photograph to range, and no forms to fill in.

What it actually looks like

Every screen below is the running product, captured — not a mockup and not a drawing. Nothing here shows a feature that does not exist.

1 Point your phone at it

The Zwaptz appraisal form on a phone, with a photograph upload area and fields for what the item is.

Make an account, photograph the thing, press the button. No forms to fill in.

2 Get a range, and a confidence

A finished appraisal: a vintage acoustic guitar valued at 150 to 450 dollars, with a confidence bar reading Low, 35 percent, above a section headed How it got there.

Not a price. A band, with Low, Medium or High beside it and the reasoning underneath.

3 See what it can become

The Zwaptz Explore screen on a phone, filtered to a distance, with item cards showing their value ranges.

Everything inside your band is something your thing can turn into.

A Zwaptz vault on a phone, headed four items worth around 730 dollars, each card carrying a value range and a confidence bar. — **Your vault**Private until you list it. Four items, a running total, a range and a confidence on each.

A Zwaptz item page on a phone showing a graded Charizard VMAX card valued at 900 to 1,400 dollars, with a Propose a swap button. — **An item**The band, and the button that acts on it. Seeded items say so on their own page.

The Zwaptz trades page showing an exchange between a pair of headphones and a boxed model car. — **Trades**What is on each side of an offer. Chat opens only once it is accepted.

The Zwaptz Explore page on a phone, with a bottom tab bar and item cards showing value ranges. — **Explore, on a phone**The mobile build has its own bottom tab bar. Most appraising happens here.

You never price your own things. You see what they turn into.

The appraisal

What can I get for this?

Point your phone at the thing you stopped using. Find out what it is worth. Trade it for something you actually want.

TimeAbout twenty seconds from photograph to range.

AccountNeeded. Trading and appraising both run on one.

CostFive appraisals a week free. Tokens after that.

A brass sextant, a cast-iron kitchen scale with a scratched steel pan, a wooden shoe last and a brass hand bell arranged on a scuffed dark table. — Four things that are easy to value and one that is not. The scale has a market; the shoe last depends entirely on who is looking.

Two hands holding a phone up to photograph a dark ceramic vase standing on a wooden table, the camera light glowing cyan. — A vase off a shelf. Twenty seconds from photograph to range.

A real appraisal, unedited. Note what it says about itself: Low confidence, and a paragraph explaining that the figure came from general knowledge rather than checked listings.

You never price your own things.: That is the part people find strange for about a minute. You do not have to decide what your bread maker is worth, defend the figure, or watch somebody talk you down from it.
It works on the ordinary things: Not only on the rare ones. Most of what people appraise is exactly what you would expect to find in a cupboard.

You never price your own things.

When it isn't sure

It tells you when it isn't sure

Every valuation arrives as a range with a word beside it: Low, Medium or High. The word is not a grade for the item. It is how much the range should be trusted.

An extreme close-up of a rosewood guitar fretboard, the frets worn into shallow divots beneath the strings and the wood darkened where a hand has held it. — Worn frets are evidence. Zwaptz says how much of the range rests on them.

A jeweller's loupe on a dark slate surface beside a short stack of trading cards in clear rigid holders, the top card visibly worn at one corner. — A grader charges to look this closely. Confidence tells you when nobody did.

A Zwaptz appraisal. A panel headed Valued without comparable sales explains that nothing recent was looked up. Below, a pair of Nike Air Force 1 Low trainers is valued at 40 to 80 dollars with a confidence bar reading Low, 40 percent, and a section headed How it got there explains that the figure came from general knowledge rather than checked listings. — A real appraisal. $40-$80 at Low, 40% - and the panel above the figure says plainly that nothing was looked up to check it against.

A wide range is the honest answer.: It is not a failure and it is not the system apologising. It is the system telling you that the difference between two readings of your thing is real, and that you should find out which one it is before trading against either.
“That is not what it is”: Every valuation carries that line, and it is a button. Press it, name the thing yourself, and it is valued again from your answer rather than from the photograph.
Where confidence is capped, and why: A valuation has three stages: identify the thing, find what comparable ones sold for, turn that into a range. The middle stage is not connected yet.

A wide range is the honest answer.

The doorway

The range is a doorway

Your thing gets a band. Everything on Zwaptz inside that band is something your thing can become. Pick one, offer, and if they say yes you arrange to meet.

A pair of worn trainers is appraised to a band of eighty-five to a hundred and twenty dollars. Six things sit inside that band — a film camera, a cast-iron pan, headphones, a board game, a hand plane and a bike helmet — and any one of them is something the trainers can become. — One item resolves to a band. Everything inside the band is something it can become.

A Zwaptz item page for a played Magic: The Gathering Black Lotus, held by Omar Haddad. It is valued at 8,000 to 18,000 dollars with a confidence reading Low, 47 percent, and carries a panel headed Example item, with an example value. Below are buttons reading Propose a swap and Keep an eye on this. — An item page. The band is the figure; Propose a swap is what you do with it. This one is marked an example — every seeded item says so on its own page.

This is not swapping your exact thing for their exact thing: The old problem with trading things directly is that it needs a coincidence: you want theirs, they want yours, at the same moment, in the same town. That coincidence almost never happens, which is why nobody trades things.
You see objects. Never a price tag.: The dollar figure is plumbing. It runs underneath, it decides what you are shown, and then it gets out of the way.
Two guitars, two different bands: An archtop and a Stratocaster, both looked after, both worth having. Neither is worth what the other is, and neither of their owners would agree on the difference.
Bundles, when one thing is not enough: A band does not have to be filled by one object. Two of your things can reach something bigger, and you can ask for two of theirs.

You see objects. Never a price tag.

The vault

Private until you say otherwise

Appraising something puts it in your vault. It publishes nothing — not to the site, not to search engines, not to anybody nearby.

An open wooden drawer photographed from above, holding a wristwatch on a sound leather strap, a brass pocket compass, a polished steel lighter, two folding fans, a ring of brass keys and about nine silver coins laid out on clean bare wood. — One drawer, appraised in an afternoon. Nobody sees it but you.

Four cloth-bound hardbacks standing in a row on a dark surface beside a stack of vinyl records in paper sleeves, an eight-millimetre film reel and a folded paper map. — Records, books, film. Valued and kept out of every search engine.

The Zwaptz vault: a heading reading 4 items, worth around $730, above the items it holds with their valuation bands. — Four things appraised, $730 held. None of it is visible to anybody else.

Appraised: It has a range and a confidence, and it sits in your vault. Nobody can see it, offer for it, or know it exists.
Listed: You have chosen to put it up. Now it appears to people near you, with a rounded distance and no location beyond that.
Taken down: You changed your mind. It goes back to being private, keeps its valuation, and nobody is told anything about it.
Appraise ten things. List one.: That is a normal afternoon on Zwaptz, and it is what the vault is shaped around. You go through a cupboard, find out what nine things are worth, discover that one of them is worth more than you thought, and put that one up.
What it is actually for: A running total of what you own, and a place where the answer stays put. Appraise the shelf once and you never have to wonder about it again.
You can leave, and take it all with you: Deleting your account is immediate and it takes the vault with it — the items, the photographs, the postcode, the address you signed up with.

Appraise ten things. List one.

Four miles away

About four miles away

That is the whole of what you learn about where somebody is, and the whole of what they learn about you. A rounded distance, and nothing else.

Two people sitting talking on a bench in the bright glass-roofed atrium of a shopping centre, shoppers walking past. — Eighteen things inside your band, sorted by how far you would walk.

A person walking along a suburban pavement in low evening sun, carrying a taped cardboard box under one arm. — Browse by category, by distance, or by what you typed.

The Zwaptz Explore screen listing appraised items, each with its valuation band and a rounded distance. — Everything appraised so far, sorted by how far you would go.

A map is a home address with extra steps.: Every listing site draws one, usually as a circle rather than a point, and calls it approximate. Three overlapping circles from three of somebody’s listings is a house.
What browsing is like: By category, by distance, by what you typed. Every view is a plain web address you can send to somebody.
Distance is the useful question: Swaps end with two people meeting, so “is it near me” decides more than price does. A perfect match forty miles away is not a match.

A map is a home address with extra steps.

What people have

Eight reasons to have a look

Anything with a second-hand value. The eight below are how the site sorts it, but the sorting is not the interesting part — what is in each one is.

A cassette Walkman, a ten-band graphic equaliser and a dynamic microphone on a small tripod with a coiled cable, on a dark surface. — Electronics

Three enamel pin badges — a navy circle, a grey triangle and a copper diamond — pinned to a rectangle of dark grey felt on a slate surface. — Collectibles

A folded indigo denim jacket and jeans on a dark surface beside a rolled tan leather belt with a brass buckle and a matched pair of polished brown leather brogues. — Fashion

A cream enamel kettle with a wooden handle, a clean dry terracotta pot and a pair of sharp secateurs with wooden handles and a cyan collar, on a dark slate surface. — Home & Garden

A blue climbing rope neatly lap-coiled with cleanly whipped ends, a stainless canister stove with a cyan valve, and a clean pair of brown leather walking boots on a dark slate surface. — Sports & Outdoors

A boxed jigsaw with a bright intact lid, a cotton drawstring bag spilling about a dozen clear glass marbles, a carved wooden rocking horse with even paintwork and a brightly painted spinning top. — Toys & Games

Three cloth-bound hardbacks stacked beside a small pile of vinyl records in clean paper sleeves, an eight-millimetre film reel on its side and a crisply folded paper map. — Media

Eighteen second-hand objects arranged in three rows on a near-black surface, among them a hand-crank sewing machine, a birdcage, a globe, a lava lamp and a rotary telephone. — Other

Electronics: The Walkman still works. So does the amplifier, the speaker and the microphone you bought for a podcast that lasted four episodes.
Collectibles: The spare. The one you upgraded from. The one that came in a box with something else you actually wanted.
Fashion: The jacket that fit the person you were in 2019. Good denim outlives several opinions about it.
Home & Garden: The bread maker, the second kettle, the terracotta pots, and the secateurs you own three pairs of.
Sports & Outdoors: One summer of climbing, one winter of running, and a stove that has boiled water twice.
Toys & Games: Used hard for eleven months and then abruptly never again. Somebody two streets away has a child the age yours was.
Media: Records, books, film. Things people keep because throwing them out feels wrong, which is not the same as wanting them.
Other: The sewing machine, the birdcage, the globe, the lava lamp. The things a category list was never going to cover.
A category is a door, not a shelf.: You are not shopping in one. Your thing has a band, and the band cuts across all eight — a bicycle wheel can become a stack of records if the numbers agree.

A category is a door, not a shelf.

The offer

The offer is the whole message

You put things on each side, send it, and the other person answers once for the whole arrangement. No haggling thread, no opening pleasantries, no phone numbers.

Two people at a round pavement café table, laughing as they exchange a camera bag and a small cardboard box across it, with street life and other tables behind them. — One message carries the whole arrangement. No haggling thread.

Two pairs of hands over a dark slate table, one passing a parcel wrapped in brown paper and tied with string to the other. — Chat opens on acceptance, and not before.

The Zwaptz how-it-works page, laying out the steps from photographing an item to arranging the handover. — The offer carries the whole arrangement. No haggling thread.

You make an offer: One of your things for one of theirs, or several for several — up to twelve items on the asking side. Both bands are shown, so you can both see the shape of it before anybody agrees.
They accept, decline, or say what was wrong: A decline can carry a short reason chosen from a list, so you know whether you were close. If it was not right, send a different offer rather than asking about it.
Chat opens on acceptance, and not before: This costs something and it is worth naming what. An open message box on an offer nobody agreed to is the cheapest way to reach a stranger who never asked to be reached.
You meet, and you both confirm: Both of you say the handover happened, and only then does it count as done. Neither person can claim a completed swap alone.
Either of you can call it off.: Right up until somebody confirms the handover. The items go straight back to the people who put them up, and back onto the site exactly as they were.
Keeping an eye on something: Every item somebody else holds carries “Keep an eye on this” beside the swap button. It saves the item to a list at the bottom of your vault and does nothing else — it reserves nothing, joins no queue, and tells the owner nothing about you.
Once somebody has confirmed: The cancel button goes. At that point a person is saying the exchange physically happened, and unpicking that is a disagreement between two people rather than something a button should settle.

Either of you can call it off.

The circle

A swap meet that assembles itself

Six people, one park, everybody goes home with something. Nobody books a hall, prints a flyer or runs anything.

Who would start oneAnybody. There would be no organiser role.

Who could joinPeople whose items land in matching bands.

Who would pick the placeThe group. Never Zwaptz.

Five people standing in a circle on grass in a park, laughing: an older man playing an acoustic guitar, a woman holding three hardback books, a man holding a bare bicycle wheel and a small amplifier on the grass between them. — Six people, one park, and everybody goes home with something.

Six people standing in a park holding what they have brought: a board game, a stack of books, a bicycle wheel, an acoustic guitar and a camera, with an amplifier and a pair of trainers on the grass. — Nobody books a hall, prints a flyer or runs anything.

A pair of white trainers on the left of a dark slate surface, and nine other second-hand objects arranged opposite them: a film camera, a cast-iron pan, headphones, books, a speaker, two wooden hand planes, a boxed game and a skate helmet. — Your guitar does not have to become one specific thing.

Six people standing in a loose line in a bright wood-floored hall with tall windows, each holding one thing they have brought: a flat boxed item, a pair of black roller skates, a stack of hardback books tied with string, a film camera on a strap, a small guitar amplifier and a bicycle wheel. A brass lantern and a leather folio sit on the floor between them. — The same idea with a roof, and somewhere to put a cup of tea.

How one would come together: You have a guitar you have stopped playing and you would like almost anything else. You would open it up rather than waiting for one person to want exactly your guitar.
Six people. One park.: The reason this would work where a two-person swap sometimes does not is that six people have far more ways of matching up than two do. Your guitar does not have to become one specific thing. It has to become something, out of everything that turned up.
Indoors would work too: A hall on a Saturday morning is the same idea with a roof and somewhere to put a cup of tea.
What it would not do: It would not book the venue, chair the meeting, hold anybody’s property, or take a cut of what changes hands.

Six people. One park.

Where you meet

Somewhere sensible

When a swap is agreed, Zwaptz suggests a few kinds of place to meet and writes the sentence for you, so arranging it does not become its own negotiation.

Open nowA place that shuts at four is no use for a six o'clock handover, and finding that out on arrival is how a meeting moves somewhere worse.

StaffedSomebody whose job is to be there. Not a promise about anything, but a different situation from an empty car park.

Busy at this hourA station concourse at half past five and the same concourse at eleven at night are not the same place.

Near transitBoth of you can get there and away without a car, which matters more than it sounds when one of you is carrying a guitar.

A corner café at dusk with a striped awning and festoon lights, two people sitting at an outside table, a barista visible at the window, and people walking past on the pavement. — Busy, overlooked, open late. Zwaptz suggests a kind of place, never one place.

Two people laughing under a wooden shelter outside a station building, a woman reading on a bench nearby, a man on his phone, a cycle rack and a car park behind them. — A station forecourt: somewhere you were both going anyway.

The Zwaptz Meeting safely page, headed with a photograph of a cafe at dusk and copy explaining that Zwaptz does not verify identity or inspect items. — Written and running. It tells you plainly what Zwaptz does not check.

What works today: Four kinds of place — a police station’s marked exchange bay, a station concourse, a café, a supermarket entrance — each with a sentence already written that you can edit before you send it. That is built and running.
We never call a place safe.: Zwaptz has not been to any of these places. It does not know who is standing in one this evening, whether the lights work, or what the road outside is like after dark.
The kinds of place it suggests: Four of them, each with a sentence already written that you can edit before you send it.
Why the arrangement stays here: Working out where to meet is the job a chat box does worst, and it is the exact point at which two people give up and move to another app to sort it out.

Room for the item: A café table is fine for a camera and useless for a rowing machine. The suggestion would account for what you are actually handing over.

We never call a place safe.

Private by default

Built to be left

The test of a product is not what it promises while you are using it. It is what happens on the day you decide to go.

Where you areA postcode, used to work out who is near you. It is never shown to anybody. What other people see is a rounded distance — “about four miles away” — and never an address, a postcode, a map or a pin.

What you have appraisedPrivate until you list it. Not on the site, not in search engines, not visible to people nearby. An item you have not listed is visible to you and to anyone you are already swapping with.

Who is watching an itemThe owner sees a count and nothing else. Never who, never when. Keeping an eye on something tells its owner nothing about you.

Your conversationsThey open when a swap is accepted and they stay on the swap. If something goes wrong and you report it, an administrator can read that conversation — which is the reason to keep it here rather than move to another app.

Seen over a man's shoulder, a hand holds a phone with a completely blank black screen, aimed at a green step-through bicycle in a brick outbuilding hung with tools. — Appraising something puts it in your vault. It publishes nothing.

A residential street on an overcast evening, parked cars along the kerb and lit windows in the houses, with nobody in shot. — Never an address, never a pin. A rounded distance is the whole of it.

The Zwaptz home page, signed out, showing a recent appraisal of a vintage brass desk lamp valued at $86 to $135. — Signed out, nothing of yours is on it. Appraising publishes nothing.

Delete everything, in one click.: From your account page, and it is immediate. Your email address, your password, your postcode and your items go, along with their photographs.
The one thing that stays: A swap you already completed stays on the other person’s trades page, shown as being with a deleted account. Your name is gone from it; the record of the exchange is not.
Reporting anything: Report sits at the bottom of every item, every profile and every swap. It reaches an administrator, who can read the conversation and suspend an account.

Delete everything, in one click.

The shed

You have one.

Maybe it is the garage. Maybe it is the loft, or the cupboard under the stairs, or one drawer in a dresser that you open about twice a year and close again.

An under-stairs cupboard seen through an open door: an upright vacuum cleaner, a folded pushchair, a tennis racquet, a canvas holdall and carrier bags stacked to the sloped ceiling. — Under the stairs.

An unconverted loft lit by one bare bulb and a shaft of light from a skylight: three leather suitcases, stacked picture frames, a rolled rug, plastic crates and a birdcage. — The loft.

A fitted bedroom closet packed to the rails with clothes, with boxes and bags stacked on the shelf above. — One cupboard.

Two men laughing in the same garage doorway, one crouched beside a mountain bike and one standing, with three open boxes of books, a tub of cables and a pegboard of garden tools around them. — The same garage, later. The room has not changed; what is in it has.

Not worth a Saturday: You know roughly what selling it involves. Photograph it in decent light. Work out what to call it. Guess a price. Answer three people who ask if you will take half, and one who asks whether you would deliver.
The middle option: There is giving it away, and there is doing the work of selling it.

Almost everything in that garage is sitting there because neither one is right.

Who it's for

Four people with the same problem

They own different things, live in different places and would not recognise each other. What they share is the reason none of it has moved.

Eight people seated around trestle tables in a community hall, laughing, with textiles, mugs and a flask spread across the table between them. — Four people with the same problem, and none of them wants a listing.

Five taped cardboard boxes stacked in the corner of an empty room with bare floorboards, a folded plaid blanket on top of them and an old radiator against the wall. — You just moved. Half of it never came out of the box.

Seen from above, a hand holds a phone with a blank dark screen over a rug covered in plastic toys — building bricks, stacking rings and a red ride-on car. — Your children grew. Somebody two streets away has a child the age yours was.

A folding rowing machine standing on end beside a soft cello case, both against a plain dark wall. — You moved on from the hobby. One season of climbing, and the kit outlasted it.

You just moved: Four boxes never got unpacked. You know what is in two of them and you are fairly sure about the third.
Your children grew: The bricks, the stacking rings, the ride-on car with a wheel that squeaks. The trike. Two scooters, one outgrown and one barely ridden.
You moved on from the hobby: The rowing machine. The cello, in its case, since about March. The camping stove and the rope you bought for a summer that turned out to be one summer.
You collect, and you have doubles: You have the spare. You have the one you upgraded from, and the one you bought because it came in a box with something else.
None of them wants money enough to do the work.: That is the whole overlap. Not income, not decluttering, not sustainability — those are things people say afterwards.

None of them wants money enough to do the work.

Sell or swap

Sometimes you should just sell it

Swapping is not better than selling. It is better at some things and worse at others, and pretending otherwise would waste an afternoon of yours before you found out.

A brass and black anglepoise desk lamp lit on a wooden desk beside two hardback books, its shade glowing warm against a plain wall. — Worth a Saturday of selling. Zwaptz still tells you the number first.

A man kneeling on a rug beside three open cardboard boxes, sorting folded clothes, books, framed photographs and small china ornaments into them. — The pile that is not worth a Saturday of listing, photographing and posting.

The Zwaptz home page on a phone: the headline Find out what your stuff is worth, then get something you want for it, above a Create an account button. — Zwaptz tells you the number either way. Selling is still yours to do.

If you need cash, sell it.: Not “consider selling”. Sell it. A swap hands you an object, and an object does not pay a bill. Everything else on this page assumes you are past that question.
Where each one wins: Five separate projects. Nobody does five projects.
What swapping is actually for: The pile of things that are genuinely worth something, individually worth less than the trouble of selling, and collectively worth quite a lot.

The situation	Sell it	Swap it
You need the money	Sell it. This is not close, and nothing below changes it.	A swap gives you an object. An object is not rent.
How long it takes	Photograph, write, price, list, field the offers, wait in for a collection.	Photograph it, get a range, put it up. The waiting is the same; the writing is not.
What it is worth	You decide the number, then find out over a fortnight whether you were right.	You get a range with a stated confidence before you commit to anything.
Rare, high-value, or collected	Sell it. A specialist auction knows buyers you cannot reach, and the fee is worth it.	The band around a rare thing is wide, which makes an even trade hard to judge.
Big, heavy, or awkward	A courier quote is often more than the item. Local sale, cash, and hope they turn up.	You are meeting somebody local anyway. The size stops being the problem.
You want a different thing	Sell yours, wait for the money, then start again as a buyer.	One arrangement instead of two. This is the case Zwaptz is built for.

If you need cash, sell it.

Real trades

Four worked examples, including an awkward one

Four objects, four bands, and what each one turned into. The figures are illustrative — they show how a band is read, not swaps that have happened.

Band$40–$70

ConfidenceMedium

Band$55–$95

ConfidenceHigh

A Zwaptz item page for a mid-century teak sideboard, showing the category, the holder, a valuation band and a confidence figure. — What a worked example looks like on the site: a band, and a button.

A Zwaptz item page for a 2021 Trek Marlin 5 mountain bike, valued at 300 to 480 dollars with a confidence bar reading Medium, 68 percent. — Valued at $300-$480, Medium at 68%. The dent is why it is not High.

A bread maker, used four times: Boxed, with the paddle and the manual. Six years old, working.
Two children's scooters: One outgrown and scuffed, one barely ridden. Both fold.
A road bike frame and a spare wheel: Aluminium, one dent in the down tube, wheel true.
A folding pocket knife, brass and rosewood: No maker's mark that the photograph could read. Older than fifty years, possibly much older.
A wide band is an answer.: The knife is not a failure of the valuation. It is the valuation saying, accurately, that it could not read a maker’s mark and that the difference between the two readings is a factor of ten.

Band: $120–$190
Confidence: Medium
Band: $25–$260
Confidence: Low

A wide band is an answer.

Try it first

Try it before you back it

Most campaigns ask you to imagine something that does not exist yet. This one is already running.

Goal$8,000, all or nothing.

LengthThirty days at most.

DeliveryOne week after the campaign closes.

Launch dateTuesday 8 September 2026, running for thirty days.

The Zwaptz appraisal screen on the site: a photograph upload area above fields for what the item is. — Photograph it. One picture, no forms to fill in.

An item page showing a valuation band above a Propose a swap button. — It comes back as a range, not a price.

The goal is small on purpose.: $8,000 is what it takes to finish the things named on the roadmap and run them for a first year. It is not a number chosen to sound ambitious.
What is already built: Appraisal, with the reasoning shown and a confidence figure beside every range. A private vault. Browsing by distance without an address ever appearing. Offers, bundles, two-sided handover confirmation, reporting, and account deletion that actually deletes.

Why it was built

Because a thing is worth something when somebody is using it, not when it is sitting on a shelf.

Selling an old skateboard is work — photographs, a listing, haggling, posting it off. Giving it away feels like a loss. So it stays in the cupboard, and that is where most of what a household owns ends up. Zwaptz is the middle: find out what the thing is worth, then trade it for something that will actually get used.

Where every dollar goes

Every line below is costed, and the arithmetic is shown rather than asserted. The two deductions come off the top, and the six lines they leave add up to the remainder exactly.

Kickstarter's fee$400

Payment processing$264

Development$4,000

Server migration$400

A chart of the $8,000 goal. Kickstarter takes $400 and payment processing takes $264, leaving $7,336 to build with. That $7,336 is divided between development at $4,000, AI inference at $1,200, marketing at $986, hosting at $600, server migration at $400 and backups at $150, each segment drawn to the width of its share. — Every figure here is settled. The six lines add up to $7,336 exactly, and each segment is drawn to the width of its share.

Off the top, before anything is built: 5% of the total raised. Fixed, and charged only if the campaign funds.
$7,336: Every line is costed, and the arithmetic is shown rather than asserted.
What it is spent on: Six lines, adding up to $7,336. Each one is a real thing that has to be paid for, and the largest by far is the work itself rather than the machine it runs on.

Hosting: $600
Backups: $150
AI inference: $1,200
Marketing: $986

What it is spent on

What gets built

What gets built, in order

Five things, in the order they get done. Each is a specific gap with a specific consequence, and the order is argued rather than assumed.

Comparable salesWithin eight weeks of the campaign closing.

Group trades and meeting placesWithin six months of the campaign closing.

Nine second-hand objects arranged in rows on a dark surface, photographed from above. — Comparable sales first: real listings standing behind every range.

Group trades: Because it removes the last reason a swap fails to happen.
Meeting places, built from facts: Because arranging where to meet is where two people give up and move to another app.
Being able to reach you: Because there is no way to email anybody today, and that shows.
Backups that leave the building: Because seven days of backups currently sit on the machine they protect.
The band is what everything runs on.: That is the whole argument for the order. Every other item on the list is a good thing to have. Comparable sales is the one that makes the number underneath all of them more trustworthy, and a swap people trust is the product.
When: Dates are counted from the campaign closing on 8 October 2026, not from the day it launches.

The band is what everything runs on.

What you get

What backing gets you

Nothing ships in a box. There is no product to manufacture, and a tote bag would only take money out of the roadmap.

First stretch goal$12,000 — comparable sales, built first. Real listings behind every range, which narrows every valuation band on the site.

Second stretch goal$16,000 — group trades. The swap meet that assembles itself, brought forward from later in the roadmap.

$10 · A permanent credit: Trading power for 250 appraisals, or 25 completed swaps — and your name on the credits page, for as long as the site exists.
$25 · A mark on your profile: Trading power for 700 appraisals, or 70 completed swaps — and something on your Zwaptz profile saying you were here first.
$50 · The build log: Trading power for 1,500 appraisals, or 150 completed swaps — and the build log: a written account of how this was made, the decisions, what went wrong, the real costs.
No tier changes a valuation.: Trading power is how much use of the site a pledge covers. It is not a better version of anything. A backer’s appraisal runs the same models, against the same evidence, and comes back with the same range and the same confidence as anybody else’s.
Stretch goals: Past the goal, more money buys more of the roadmap, sooner. That is the whole mechanism — there is no separate list of unlockables waiting behind a number.

No tier changes a valuation.

One week

Seven days from the campaign closing to backers being on the new machine. Not a quarter, not “in the new year”.

Campaign closesThursday 8 October 2026

Backers are on the new machineSeven days after that, whenever it is.

A woman walks along a tree-lined suburban street into low evening sun, carrying a taped cardboard box under one arm and a waxed canvas bag over her shoulder. — Seven days from the campaign closing to backers being on the new machine.

Move to a bigger machine: The site currently runs on a box sized for a demonstration. Backers arriving is the first time it has to be sized for people.
Backups, and restoring from them: Nightly backups, integrity-checked, copied off the machine they protect. Today every copy sits on the same disk as the thing it is backing up, which is the single most consequential gap on the list.
Live for backers: Names go on the credits page. Anyone whose tier includes the build log receives it as a document.
A backup you have never restored from is a hypothesis.: That line has been at the top of the backup script since long before this campaign, and it is why two of the seven days are spent on something no backer will ever see.
Counted from when: The two features on the roadmap are not part of this week and are not claimed to be. Delivery week is the move, the backups and the credits — the roadmap is the year.

A backup you have never restored from is a hypothesis.

Straight answers

Risks, challenges and questions

Everything below is either a real risk or a real limitation, written out rather than summarised. The things that are not settled say so.

Does it cost anything to use?Every account gets five free appraisals a week. Appraising beyond that, and completing a swap, both draw on tokens — the site’s own usage credit. No money changes hands between the two people in a swap: nobody pays the other, and Zwaptz never touches a payment between you.

Do I have to trade the thing I appraise?No. Appraising puts an item in your vault and publishes nothing. Appraising a whole shelf and listing none of it is a perfectly good outcome.

What do other people learn about where I live?A rounded distance and nothing else. Never an address, a postcode, a map or a pin — what’s nearby covers exactly what is and is not shown.

What happens if a swap falls through?Either of you can call it off, right up until somebody confirms the handover, and both items go straight back where they came from. If they never turned up, it is the same button. The swap has the whole sequence.

Risks and challenges: Their prohibited list rules out spaces whose primary purpose is selling or re-selling items. Zwaptz sells nothing, takes no cut and handles no money between the two people in a swap. The tiers do carry trading power — usage of the site, paid up front — and that is the part of this campaign a reviewer is most likely to question. We are not the ones who decide, and it has not been put to them yet.
Questions: Every account gets five free appraisals a week. Appraising beyond that, and completing a swap, both draw on tokens — the site’s own usage credit. No money changes hands between the two people in a swap: nobody pays the other, and Zwaptz never touches a payment between you.

Can I delete everything?

Yes, immediately, from your account page. The one exception is a swap you already completed, which stays on the other person’s page attributed to a deleted account — privacy says why.

When does the campaign start?

Tuesday 8 September 2026. It runs for thirty days and closes on Thursday 8 October 2026. Delivery is one week after that, on Thursday 15 October 2026.

Why was this built?

Because a thing is worth something when somebody is using it, not when it is sitting on a shelf. Most of what a household owns stops being used long before it stops being useful.

Selling it is work — photographs, a listing, haggling, posting it off. Giving it away feels like a loss. So it stays in the cupboard. Zwaptz is the middle: find out what the thing is worth, then trade it for something that will actually get used.

Everything described on these pages either runs today or is marked as not built. You can go and appraise something before you decide whether to back it.

Nothing on this site assumes the answer.