How many cards a shelf holds, and what actually runs out

There is no card limit, on free or on Pro

The pricing table says Unlimited in both columns for cards on your shelf, and that row is the same on both sides on purpose. A shelf is the thing you are here for. Charging for the right to keep one more link would be charging for the product itself.

The plan limits Credenza does have are all on work that costs us money to do for you: AI size-chart reads, link resolves, Ask questions, QC photos an item, and how many hauls you keep open at once. Every one of those makes a request leave your phone. A card does not. Adding a card writes a few hundred bytes to your own browser and nothing else happens, so there is nothing to meter and nothing to sell you.

So the honest answer to "how many can I keep?" is not a number we chose. It is a number your browser chose, and it is large.

A card is text. Photos are what take up the room.

A card is a title, a link, a price, a size, a colourway, a status and your note. That is text, and text is almost free. A thousand text-only cards take less space than a single photograph off your camera roll. If your shelf is links and notes, you will not reach a wall.

Photos are the other story. Credenza compresses every image before it stores it — about 640 pixels on the long edge, WebP where the browser supports it, quality stepped down until the file is roughly 32KB. That is small for a photo and it is still hundreds of times a card's text. An item keeps up to twenty gallery photos and up to twelve QC photos, so one thoroughly documented item can be most of a megabyte on its own.

The practical shape of that: a shelf of 300 text-only cards is nothing. A shelf of 300 cards where every one carries a full QC set is a real amount of data, and that is the shelf that can meet the browser's ceiling. If you want a rule of thumb, count photographed items, not cards.

Credenza drops thumbnails, never links

Browsers do not warn you before storage runs out. They refuse the write. An app that treats that refusal as a crash loses whatever you just typed, and an app that treats it as "the shelf is empty" is worse. Credenza treats it as a request to make room.

When a save is refused, the order is fixed and it is deliberate. First it strips the stored QC and gallery photos from the oldest cards, three cards at a time, retrying the save after each batch. Only when no card has any of those left does it start on cover thumbnails, again oldest first, again three at a time. It stops the moment the save succeeds, so it removes the least it can.

What it never touches is the part you cannot get back. Your links, titles, prices, sizes, notes, statuses and haul assignments are not candidates for removal at any stage. A photo can be fetched again from the seller's page; the note you wrote at 1am about which colourway looked right cannot. When this happens you get told, in those words: storage was full, thumbnails were removed from N older cards, links and notes are safe.

The one failure that is not silent

There is a case beyond a full shelf: the browser refuses the write for a reason that is not space at all. Private-browsing modes, a locked-down site-data setting, or a storage permission you revoked will do it.

Credenza does not pretend to have saved in that case. The status turns to a save error and you are told to export a backup before you close the tab, because the shelf on screen is real and the shelf on disk is not. If you ever see that message, take it literally and export first. There is also a recovery download that hands you the raw stored data exactly as it was found, for the rarer case where the shelf on disk is unreadable rather than unwritable.

Export once and the ceiling stops existing

Open Settings and export your shelf. You get a credenza-shelf-YYYY-MM-DD.json file that holds every card in full, and it re-imports whole. That single file turns every version of this problem — a full browser, a cleared cache, a dead phone, a browser that decided to reclaim site data — into a thirty-second fix.

It is worth doing before a big paste. If you are about to drop a Reddit haul comment or a whole Yupoo album onto the shelf, export first. Not because the paste is dangerous, but because a backup taken before a large change is the only one that lets you undo the change.

There is also a CSV export for a different job: opening your haul in Numbers, Excel or Sheets to total it. That one is for reading. The .json is the one that restores.

What an account changes, and what it does not

Your browser is always the source of truth. Credenza reads your shelf from your own device first, so it is on screen before any network call finishes, and it keeps working with no signal at all. An account adds a copy, it does not replace the original.

Restoring that copy is free. Sign in on a new phone and your shelf comes back, on the free plan, deliberately — a lost phone should not mean lost work, and no subscription price is worth making it mean that. When cards do arrive from your account, Credenza counts the ones this device did not already have and tells you how many were restored.

What Pro adds is the continuous half: every edit keeps flowing to the account so two devices stay in step without you thinking about it. On free, the copy is refreshed when you sign in rather than continuously.

When both sides have changed, nothing is thrown away by document. Each card is compared on its own timestamp, so an edit on your phone and a different edit on your laptop both survive. Deletions are recorded separately, so a card you deleted does not come back on the next sync — and a card you edited after deleting it does, because you clearly wanted it.

The one place a number does apply

Your own shelf is unlimited. A shared link is not, and it is worth knowing the difference before you build a 200-item share and wonder why it is refused.

A share is a snapshot that travels to someone else, so it has to stay small enough to load quickly on a stranger's phone: up to 60 items in one link. The number of shares you keep alive is the plan limit — three on free, a hundred on Pro. Neither of those touches the shelf they came from. Delete a share and the cards are exactly where they were.

If a haul is larger than one share, split it the way you would split a parcel — by seller, or by what is going in which box.

How to keep a large shelf pleasant

Close hauls you have received. A haul is one parcel, not a folder, and archiving a finished one keeps the board readable and frees a slot against the two-open-hauls free limit. The cards stay on your shelf.

Delete the cards you have genuinely decided against. Not to save space — you have the space — but because a shelf you can read is worth more than a shelf that is complete. The decision is the product.

Let albums stay at the seller. Credenza brings in six photos from an album by default and links out for the rest, which keeps a card light and keeps the album one tap away. Six covers the front, the back, the tag and a detail shot, which is enough to judge a piece.

Export monthly. It costs a minute and it removes the only version of this question that has a bad answer.