What we are
A small independent team that makes iPhone apps. Patine is one of them.
We are not auctioneers, dealers, valuers or appraisers, and nobody here will tell you what your grandmother’s tea service is worth on the strength of a qualification. What we can do is build software that finds what objects like it have actually sold for, shows you those sales with the house and the date attached, and says plainly when it cannot find any.
Why the app is shaped the way it is
There are about fifteen apps that identify antiques from a photograph. Nearly all of them work the same way: you take a picture, an AI produces a confident dollar figure, and there is no way to check where that figure came from. Their own store reviews are the argument against them — valuations definitely too high, about 50% accurate, where is the sold price versus the asking price.
A number nobody can check is worth nothing, and it is worse than nothing when somebody sells a piece on the strength of it.
So Patine is built on one rule, and every other decision in it follows from that rule:
Never show a number without showing where it came from. When we do not know, say so, and say what would make us know.
In practice that means a value is always a range rather than a single figure, every range is shown beside the real past sales that produced it, every identification carries how confident it is, and when there are no comparable sales the app says exactly that instead of inventing something plausible. That last screen is the one we are proudest of, and it is the one our competitors do not have.
Where the sold prices come from
Auction houses that publish their own past results. Every comparable in the app carries the name of the house, the date it sold, and a link straight to that house’s own page, so you can check us. If a link does not lead to a real sale, the app has a bug and we want to hear about it.
We build that index with a crawler that identifies itself and respects robots.txt, and
there is a page about it for anyone who finds it in a server log.
The magpie
His name is Cyril. He is a magpie because a magpie is the impulse the app serves — ooh, shiny — and because magpies are famously discerning. He has been looking at other people’s objects for forty years and he is not easily impressed.
He has one job. The hardest screen in this app is the one that says we could not find any sold lots close enough to price your object; delivered flat, that reads as a broken feature. Delivered by a bird squinting at the thing and asking to see the underside, it reads as an expert saying hold on. Same information, opposite feeling.
He does not appear on the paywall. Using a charming character to sell a subscription is precisely the manipulation we are positioning against, and that is a rule rather than a preference.
Getting in touch
info@getpatine.com. A person reads it.