Antique Identifier is live. It is our first AI app aimed squarely at the collector world, and it is the most fun ASO we have shipped this year.
The pitch is simple. You photograph an old thing — a teacup, a brooch, a chair leg, a wristwatch — and the app returns an opinion. Era, likely region of origin, what to compare it against, and a sober market band based on recent comps. Not an auction price. A first read, the way a knowledgeable friend would talk to you at a flea market.
What is under the hood
A mix of GPT-4o vision for descriptive read, a curated taxonomy for category mapping, and a price-band model trained on completed-listing data from the last twenty-four months. The app does not pretend to be Sotheby's. It is honest about uncertainty: every appraisal carries a confidence score, and below a threshold the app will tell you to ask a human.
We ship the model behind a serverless layer because we wanted strict cost control. The current per-photo cost lets us offer a generous free tier and a fair subscription on top of it.
Who it is for
Three audiences keep showing up in beta:
- Estate-sale runners, who use it to triage in twenty seconds what they used to spend twenty minutes on.
- Collectors of one thing, who want a fast sanity check before buying.
- Heirs, who inherited a houseful and need a starting point.
Why we built it
We scanned the App Store top charts and found a category with real demand and surprisingly thin supply. The biggest competitor has half a star less than its category average. The reviews are the same complaints, repeated for years. We thought we could do better.
This is the niche-first thesis we wrote about earlier this year put into action.
What is next
Version 1.1 ships in three weeks with a new "compare" view that lets you place two objects side by side and see what makes them different. Version 1.2 brings collections you can save and export. The roadmap is on the in-app changelog.
If you have an attic, an estate sale this Saturday, or a teacup in your kitchen you have always wondered about, give it a try.