Help

Pasting a link

Press Add to board on any board and paste a product link. The link identifies itself under the field straight away (picture, name, shop, price) before you decide to keep it. Saving is immediate: the card appears saying "Reading the link…", then fills itself in with the name, shop, price and picture, without you reloading the page. Your page never waits for someone else's website; the reading happens in the background.

You can also pick which board the thing lands on, so something added while looking at one board can be filed on another.

Things with no link

Not everything you want has a page. Type a name instead of a link and the card is saved as-is. You can add a price, notes and tags yourself by clicking the card.

From your phone

hoardboard installs to your home screen and then behaves like any other app you can share to.

https://hoardboard.app/share?url=[Shortcut Input]

When your phone shares a link, it usually sends a name along with it. That name comes into the form too, because sometimes the phone knows something the server cannot find out: a shop that refuses to be read still showed its real title to your browser. You can clear the field if you would rather let the page reading fill it in.

A board is one collection of things you are thinking about buying. Make one per project, per room, per person you buy gifts for, whatever line makes sense to you. Each board has its own name, icon and Add button, and its own view of everything on it.

The three statuses

Every item is in one of three states: want (still thinking about it), bought, or passed (decided against it, kept for the record). Passed items stay on the board, because knowing what you decided not to buy is half the point.

You can change a status two ways. Every card has a dropdown: pick the new status and the card updates in place. Or, in the columns view, drag the card into another column. Both do the same thing; the dropdown is there for anyone not using a mouse.

Grid and columns

The toggle at the top right switches between two views, and the app remembers which one you were using.

Grid shows the cards in one flow, in your own order. New things land on top, and dragging a card somewhere else keeps it there. Tabs for All, Want, Bought and Passed each show a count, so you can see the shape of the board before clicking. The filter box narrows the grid as you type, and the sort menu swaps in a computed order (by when you added things, price, or priority), which puts the drag handles away until you come back to "My order". Filter, tab and sort all work together, and the address bar keeps up, so a filtered view is a link you can send or bookmark.

Columns lays the board out by status, one column each, with a count and a money total in every column header. Dragging here moves a card between statuses: from Want to Bought, and the counts and totals update as it lands.

The wish-side total

Next to the board's name is a total "on the wish side". That is the sum of everything still marked want: what it would cost to buy the lot. Bought and passed items are not counted, so the number falls as you decide.

A board starts out private: only you can see it. Sharing gives one other person access to that one board, and nothing else.

Inviting someone

Open the board's settings and find the Sharing section. Enter their email address, choose whether they can view or edit, and press Invite.

hoardboard does not email them for you. Instead you get an invitation link, shown right there under their address. Send it however you already talk to them: text, chat, email. When they open the link, they see the board's name, who shared it, and an Accept button. Once they accept, the board appears on their home page under "Shared with you".

The link works only for someone signed in, and an invitation can only be accepted once. Until it is accepted, you can cancel it from the same Sharing section.

Viewer or editor

A viewer can look. They see the board and everything on it, marked "view only", with none of the controls: no adding, no changing statuses, no price checks.

An editor can add and change things: add items, move them between statuses, run price checks. Anything they add lives on your board, in your account, like anything else on it.

Neither can rename the board, share it with anyone else, or delete it. Those stay with you, always.

Your other boards stay yours

Sharing one board shares exactly that board. The person you invite sees nothing else of yours: not your other boards, not your searches, nothing. To them, boards you have not shared do not exist.

Removing a share

The Sharing section in the board's settings lists everyone with access. Press Remove next to a name and their access ends immediately. The board disappears from their list, and opening it stops working. You can share it with them again later if you change your mind.

When an item has a link and you still want it, hoardboard checks its price every night, around 3am. Late enough that shops have settled their overnight pricing, early enough that a price drop is waiting for you when you wake up. You can also check any time with the "Check price" button next to the price.

Price history

Once an item has two or more recorded prices, its page shows a small chart of where the price has been, along with the lowest and highest it has reached. The lowest price is marked in the list, so you can see at a glance whether today's number is a good one.

Shops that will not be read

Some shops answer hoardboard's own reader with a page that says nothing: no name, no price, no picture. Amazon, Walmart and Target are among them.

hoardboard identifies itself honestly when it reads a page, saying who it is and where to find us, and these shops turn every server away, ours included. So for shops like these, hoardboard reads the page in a browser instead, and keeps what it finds. Sometimes that is its own browser, one page at a time and slowly; sometimes it is a reading service whose job is reading pages the way a browser does. Each account has a daily allowance of those reads, since every one costs something.

When even that gives nothing back, the card tells you so, rather than showing a blank card and leaving you to wonder.

What still works there

More than you might expect. The link you pasted usually says what the thing is called (a product address carries the name in its own words), so hoardboard names the item from the address when the page will not. And if you shared the link from your phone, the phone sends the page's title along with it, and hoardboard keeps that name too.

If a shop gives nothing back through any door, you can add the price and the picture yourself: open the item, type in the price you saw, and add a photo. The price you enter shows in the history like any other.

What you save in hoardboard is yours. You can take a full copy of it whenever you like, and you can delete all of it in one step.

Taking your data with you

Go to Settings and choose the export. Your browser downloads a single JSON file containing everything in your account: your boards, items, notes, tags, statuses and price history. JSON is a plain text format, so you can open the file in any text editor, keep it as a backup, or feed it into another tool.

There is no limit on how often you export. It is your data; take a copy as often as you like.

Deleting your account

Deleting your account is also in Settings. Because it cannot be undone, you are asked to type your email address exactly before it goes through. It is a pause to make sure you mean it, not a hurdle.

When you confirm, your account is deleted right away, along with everything in it: your workspaces, boards, items, tags, price checks and the stored preview images. We delete rather than archive. There is no "deactivated" state where your data sits waiting, and nothing is kept back for later. Encrypted backups age out entirely within 14 days, and after that no copy of your data remains anywhere.

If you think you might come back, export first. Once the account is gone, we cannot recover it for you.

The full picture

This page covers getting your data out and deleting it. For everything else (what we collect, what we never do with it, and who helps us run the service), read the privacy policy. It is short and written in plain words on purpose.