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.

15 · The campaign

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 what the screens above show: photograph something, and twenty seconds later it tells you what it is, what it is worth as a range, and how confident it is in that range. 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

The goal is small on purpose.

$8,000 is what it takes to finish the things named on the roadmap and release them as Zwaptz version one. It is not a number chosen to sound ambitious, and none of it is a year of running a company.

Kickstarter is all or nothing. At $7,999 nobody is charged and none of it happens, 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, costed where it can be, and listed line by line on funds — development, testing and the other technical costs of building version one.

What the prototype is for

It exists to test whether the core idea holds up: that you can photograph something you own and get back a number honest enough to trade on. It is a development build rather than a product.

Zwaptz version one is what makes that usable by anybody — real comparable sales behind the valuation, meeting places drawn from facts, and a mail server, so that a range can carry a confidence above the lowest one and a report can get a reply. That is the work this campaign pays for, and the roadmap lists the five conditions that make it finished.

Launch date

Tuesday 8 September 2026, running for thirty days.

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.