Our story

Why I built Hoardr

Written by Steve, who made this for his dad

My dad has been collecting for decades. Model trains, diecast mining and construction machines, thousands of pieces, and he knows the story behind every one of them.

A while back he wanted to show me his collections, and more than that, he wanted to show me his system. He was proud of it, and he should have been. He had built the whole thing himself out of Excel.

Every item had a row. Make, model, scale, livery, running number, what he paid, where it came from, which box it lives in. It was meticulous, because he is meticulous.

Then he showed me the photos, and that is where it fell apart.

Putting a picture into a spreadsheet is miserable. The image floats over the cells, or it anchors to the wrong row, or the file doubles in size and the whole thing crawls. So the photos lived somewhere else: on his phone, on an external drive, in folders named after the spreadsheet they were meant to match. Different collections lived in different spreadsheets, with documents linking them together, and a second hard drive as the backup.

Cataloguing a handful of items could take him an evening. He has thousands.

I went looking for an app that would fix this for him. There are plenty for one specific thing, stamps or coins or cards, and plenty that are really inventory tools wearing a different hat. None of them handled a collection like his: several very different collections, hundreds of category specific details, photos that actually belong to the item, and values that change over time.

So I built one.

Hoardr started as an app for my dad. One place where an item is a photo, its details, what it cost, what it is worth now, and where it is stored, with nothing living in a separate folder. His old spreadsheets import straight in, photos attach to the item instead of floating over it, and the backup is simply there rather than something he has to remember.

What I did not expect was how much the valuation would matter to him. Knowing what a piece is actually worth, based on what similar ones have recently sold for, turns a catalogue into something useful for insurance, and for his family later on.

It works for anything. Trains and diecast because that is where it started, but buckles, stamps, jugs, cards, coins, records, whatever you collect. The categories adapt, and if yours is not there you can add your own fields.

If you have a spreadsheet and a folder of photos that do not talk to each other, I built this for you too.