How to ask your own shelf a question

A question about your shelf, not about the internet

Ask searches the cards you saved. Every other search box you have used this week searched somebody else's index. This one searches yours. It reads your titles, your notes, your sellers, your sizes, and the status each item sits at, then answers in a sentence and moves the matching cards to the top.

That distinction decides which questions work. Ask never sees a store page, a batch thread, or a product you have not saved. If a card is not on your shelf, no wording will make Ask return it.

Type it the way you would say it

Open the Shelf tab and type into the same box you search with. Ask does not need keywords that appear on the card. It reads the question, so a plain sentence works better than a guess at the exact title.

what is still in Want under $40

which items are waiting on QC

what did I buy from that seller in the spring haul

Type-to-filter still runs as you type, so the shelf narrows before you ask anything. Use plain search when you remember a word from the title. Use Ask when you remember the situation but not the word.

Press Cloud Ask

The Cloud Ask button sits beside the search box. Press it and Credenza picks the 25 cards closest to your question and sends only those. It does not send your whole shelf, and it does not send photos.

Twenty-five is a hard cap, not a target. If you have 400 cards, the 25 most relevant go. That is enough to answer a real question and small enough to keep the call fast and cheap, which is what keeps the free plan free.

Read the answer against the cards

The answer appears above your shelf, and the matching cards move to the top. Each one carries a single line saying why it was picked. The first card opens on its own so you can check the answer against the real price, status and note.

Check it. The answer is a summary of your cards, and a card with a stale price gives a confident answer with a stale price in it. The cards are the source. The sentence is a convenience.

Every field on the card, in words

A question can only be answered from something the card carries. These are the fields Ask receives:

• Title, summary and note. Your own words weigh heaviest, so a note is the single best thing you can add to a card.
• Price, in US dollars. Converted where the listing was in yuan, so "under $40" compares like with like.
• Status. Want, Bought, Shipped, QC, green light, red light or Returned.
• Seller, batch, size and colorway. The fields you fill in yourself.
• Days since you saved it. Which makes "what have I been sitting on longest" a real question.
• Tags, people, project and use case. Whatever you attached when you saved it.

Photos are never sent. Neither is your account, your email, or any card outside the 25.

Four questions Ask will get wrong

Say this plainly, because a tool that pretends to know everything wastes your time twice.

• It cannot find you a new item. Ask searches your shelf. It is not a search engine for finds, and it will not go and look for one.
• It cannot judge a batch. No opinion on quality, no comparison of one factory against another. Judge the QC photos yourself.
• It cannot read a card you never wrote on. A bare link with no note answers almost nothing. Resolve it first so it has a title and a price.
• It cannot see the future of a parcel. Shipping weight and cost come from the parcel planner, not from Ask.

Five a day free, 40 a day on Pro

One press of Cloud Ask is one ask. The count resets at midnight UTC. Cancelling a running ask before it returns does not refund it, and asking the same question twice costs two.

Ask calls a paid model, which is why it carries a number at all. So do link resolves and size-chart reads. Everything else in Credenza — saving, tagging, sorting, planning a parcel, opening Buy in your agent — runs on your phone and is not counted.

Five a day is enough to check your shelf morning and evening. If you are hitting the limit, you are probably using Ask where plain search would do. Search is unlimited.

Fix the card, not the question

When an answer misses, the wording is rarely the problem. The card is. Ask returned what your shelf contained.

• Add a note. One line about why you saved it. Notes weigh more than any other field.
• Set the status. Move items out of Want when you buy them, or "still in Want" answers wrongly forever.
• Fill in the seller. Then "what did I get from this seller" works.
• Resolve the link. A resolved card carries a title and a price. An unresolved one carries a URL.

The pattern holds across the app: the shelf you keep decides the answers you get. A tidy shelf is worth more than a clever question.

What leaves your phone, and for how long

Your shelf lives on your device. Ask is one of three features that send anything out at all, and it sends the smallest thing that can answer your question: 25 cards as text, and the question itself.

Nothing is stored on the way through. Credenza keeps the status code and how long the call took, so the service can be kept working, and never the question or the cards. The privacy page says the same thing in full.