After months of nights and weekends, I'm excited to share this: the ArteraQ Desktop app is here.
ArteraQ started as a cloud platform helping galleries, collection managers, and art advisors replace spreadsheet chaos for inventory, consignments, and sales. It's worked well for teams. But I kept hearing the same thing from a specific group: "I love this, but I don't want my collection data living on someone else's server."
So I built them their own version.
ArteraQ Desktop is a native Mac app (Silicon) that runs entirely on your machine. No account. No internet connection required. No subscription to keep using it. Your artwork records, images, and documents live in a local database on your Mac, full stop.
What it does:
* Full artwork inventory — images, valuations, condition, status
* Artist records linked to inventory
* Consignment and sales workflows, with commission calculations
* AI-assisted cataloging (bring your own OpenAI key — your images never have to touch our servers)
* Automatic local backups before every update, plus manual backup/restore
* Dark mode, most requested feature by far
* Built on Tauri and SQLite, so it's fast, small, and needs no server to run.
Cloud vs. desktop, honestly: cloud is for teams — multi-user, real-time, any device, we handle backups and uptime, subscription-based since we're running the infrastructure. Desktop is for anyone who wants full ownership of their data and doesn't mind being their own backup admin (which the app makes easy). It's a one-time purchase — you own it, and it keeps working even if you never buy another update.
Same philosophy either way: replace the spreadsheet, make cataloging fast, make your collection data actually usable.
This one took longer than I expected — packaging a real backend into a native app is a different kind of hard than shipping a web feature. But it's out now, and I'd love for the people who've been asking for this to try it and tell me what's missing.