About Thingfile
Thingfile is a catalog of your own belongings, running on your own server. You photograph a thing, it gets a name and a category and whatever notes matter to you, and from then on you can find it again.
It exists because of a specific and very ordinary kind of annoyance: knowing for a fact that you own the thing, knowing you were sensible about where you put it, and having no idea where that was.
Who it is for
Anyone whose things have outgrown their memory. The storage unit you visit twice a year. The move where everything became forty numbered boxes and the numbers stopped meaning anything by box nine. The garage, the loft, the workshop, the craft room. Anywhere things go in and are not seen again until the day they are needed.
It is also, quietly, for the person who ends up sorting your things out one day. A catalog with photographs is a considerably kinder thing to inherit than a garage.
What it does
- Photographs. Every item can carry photos, taken on the phone or picked from your library.
- Suggests. Point the camera at several things at once and it picks out the separate objects, proposing a name, category and tags for each. You correct what it got wrong, and it does get some wrong.
- Attachments. Manuals, receipts and warranties live on the item rather than in a drawer.
- Places. A category can be a place inside a place: Garage › Shelf 2 › Bin A. Look in the garage and you see the shelves and bins too.
- Search. By name, place, or anything you noted at the time. Sorted however you like, and paged, so a large catalog stays quick.
- Notes. Free text on every item, for the things that do not fit a field. Searching by name looks in the notes too.
- Counts. Six of the same thing is one item with a quantity. Nought is allowed: used up, but still worth knowing you had it.
- Offline. The whole catalog is on your phone, so a storage unit with no signal is still searchable, and things you add or change down there sync when you surface.
- Sharing. Group things into a collection and invite people by email, as viewers who can look or editors who can add and change. Nobody is added until they accept.
- Import and bulk edits. Bring in a CSV from a spreadsheet you already kept; one bad row stops the whole file, so nothing half-arrives. Then refile, retag, move or delete many things at once, on the web or the phone.
- Prices. Reference tables for the things you buy and sell: the models and variants, which are better and why, and a price range for each in each condition, built from sold prices you record. Any item can ask what it would sell for.
- Deals and watching. Saved eBay searches, checked through eBay's own API and ranked against your ranges, with a push to your phone when one stands out. Listings you have bid on are tracked against your maximum. It links out to eBay; it never bids or buys for you.
- Connected apps. Keys for other software, each read only, allowed to add items, or allowed to manage saved searches, made with your password and revocable at any time. An MCP server lets an AI assistant look things up in your catalog and prices, and, with the right key, set up your eBay searches. It never changes your items.
- Export. CSV or JSON, whenever you like. It is your catalog and it should be able to leave.
What it is not
It is not asset management for a business, not a barcode scanner for a warehouse, and not a marketplace. It will tell you what something is going for, but it never bids, buys or lists anything: that stays on eBay, done by you. And it has no interest whatsoever in your contacts.
You run it
Thingfile is self-hosted, like the rest of what we build. There is no account with us, no hosted service, and nothing of yours on our servers. You run the server, and the apps talk to it. What we publish is the software: a C++ HTTP/JSON backend on PostgreSQL, a pricing server beside it on the same database, a React web app, iOS and Android clients, and an MCP server for AI assistants.
It is MIT licensed and in development. The service code is not published yet; when it is, this page will point at it rather than collect an email address in the meantime.