My camera roll & Chrono24 faves was my watch collection "system." So I built at the app I would want
I'm a collector, and my "system" was a mess — camera roll full of hero shots, a Chrono24 watchlist that kept growing, a YouTube review queue I never finish.
So over a lot of nights and weekends I built Horology Vault. No investors, no growth team — just a collector who wanted a real home for his watches.
Paste a link to any watch and it fills itself in. A YouTube review, a Chrono24 listing, a retailer page. It identifies the watch and pulls in the full spec sheet, the photo, and the asking price. That review queue you never finish? Paste the link, it's in your vault. You can also just point your camera at a dial.
The part nobody else does: it tracks the hunt, not just what you own. Most of the fun happens before you buy — months of research, videos, forum threads, listings you keep checking. So every watch you're pursuing gets its own Research Board: save the videos, the articles, the wrist shots, the listings, all in one place, with the price range and your target number. Then when you finally pull the trigger, all of that research follows the watch into your collection — it becomes the story of how you found it. Years later you can still see the review that made you want it.
The rest:
- Full provenance — box & papers, straps, service receipts, and a Provenance Package PDF you can hand a buyer
- The Departed Archive — every watch you've sold, with a Regret Level slider (1–10, no judgment)
- Wrist log, so you can prove you don't just buy and forget
Being straight with you: the link thing is best-effort — most sites work, some block scrapers and it falls back to manual entry. And it's free up to 3 watches, then a subscription. I'd rather charge collectors than run ads or sell data.
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/the-horology-vault/id6778231860
Built it because I wanted it to exist. Happy to answer anything — technical, why the Regret Level exists (therapy, mostly), whatever.