CollectMyTrip

You remember the first one. Do you remember the fortieth?

A shelf of mugs is a list of everywhere you have been — and the part you actually want back is not the mug. It is the day.

Italia — stood in front of it and walked away

Why this exists

Four and a half miles in the heat, and I left behind the one I needed.

Naples, middle of summer. My wife had wanted the Amalfi coast. The kids wanted another day by the pool. I wanted a mug.

Got there, bought the Naples one, and left the Italia sat next to it — stood there trying to picture our shelf at home and decided we already had it.

We didn't. So it is gone now, unless I pay three times the price online. After four and a half miles. And it is not the first time.

That is the actual problem. Not forgetting what is on the shelf — not being able to check while stood in the shop with the thing in my hand. Every app I tried wanted me sat at the kitchen table. Nobody built the one you need at the till.

So I built the one I wanted. It works with no signal, because that is where you need it.

What it does

Three things, and nothing else.

Tick what you own

Search a city, tap the ones on your shelf. 571 mugs across 418 places already in the list. If yours is missing, add it and it is there for the next person.

Watch the map fill in

Three maps: where you have been, what you have collected, and what is still to get — with the places you have already stood sorted to the top, because those are the easy ones to find.

Keep the day attached to the mug

The date, who you were with, what you remember. A minute per mug. In ten years it is the only part that matters.

38Mugs

19Countries

11Years

What your own shelf looks like, counted

The part nobody else does

The mug outlives the memory.

Every other tracker records the day you typed it in. That is a database timestamp, not a memory. Ours records the day you were there.

Forty minutes for a pizza in Naples. Thirty queuing outside in the heat. Eleven in the morning, already stuffed, ate the lot on a street bench because there was no chance I was wasting a bit of it. The kind of thing worth writing down

A collector told me he keeps a plastic folder and moves receipts, tickets and maps into it day by day while he is away, so he has something to look back through when he is old. He had already built this by hand, before anyone offered him an app.

Write it as you go and you end up with something worth printing. That is coming: your own collection, as a book.

Why you can trust what it tells you

Built by a collector, for collectors. Not for sellers.

Every price says whether it sold or was only asked for. One seller wants for a mug and calls it rare Asking — three days on, unsold. Another has the same mug at . That series actually sells for Sold. Nobody else tells you which is which.

We do not buy, sell, or hold anything. No shop, no middleman, no cut. What we do is introduce two collectors and give them both the same honest numbers to agree on. What you settle on is between you.

And we will never take commission on a trade. If we earned money on sales we could not publish honest prices for the same mugs — and the honest prices are the whole point.

The list is incomplete, and always will be. Three new releases turned up in a collectors' group five days after launch that we did not have. So every entry says how far we would stand behind it — verified, listed, member added, or disputed. Nothing is ever quietly deleted.

Turn the mug over. Where it was made, what year, whether the barcode is still there — all on the base, and all of it moves the price. A torn barcode alone is worth 12.5%. We are the only ones recording it.

See the numbers behind all of that →

The catch

There isn't one.

Free. No account needed to use it. No ads, and no advertiser is ever going to pay to be in here. Everything saves to your own device, and there is a back-up button so a cleared browser cannot take it from you.

Later there will be things worth paying for — a printed map, your collection as a proper book, a valuation you could hand an insurer. The tracking itself stays free.

Start with the ones you can see from where you are sitting.

Takes about four minutes. You do not have to finish it today.

Tick off my collection

Why trust the numbers

It is early, the list has holes in it and the prices are not in yet. You are seeing it early on purpose. If you collect these too, tell me what is missing and I will actually fix it.
Simon