Swatcher was officially launched in May of 2025, and in that time, it has gone through many updates. It has exceeded my own expectations in terms of traction and gets over a thousand visitors a month.

The vast majority of those users come from Google, and they land on a specific paint detail page. From there, they typically visit the paint page on the brand’s website.

That was my intended goal as a value-first approach. I wasn’t happy with having to jump around different sites to compare colours, so I wanted a system where I could view a colour and see suggested complementary colours.

There’s also the Text to Paint feature. You give it a description, and it generates a palette of paint colours for you to browse. It’s been used nearly 900 times in 6 months, which is pretty cool to see.

It was only recently that I took a punt on implementing Stripe to introduce a “Pro” plan. Features aren’t gated, but limits are imposed as they cost money to run. Again, keeping it value-first. The main reason people are there is to browse paint colours, and you don’t need an account to do that.

What’s next?

Well, I don’t see Swatcher changing too much. It’ll still be maintained and updated as it has been. Features may be slower to materialise, but only because it already does what it needs to. I could do a better job of surfacing different features, like pointing your camera at something to get a suggested matching paint colour, but I don’t see any massive features coming soon.

It was architected in a way that the API is independent of the Swatcher front-end. I did this because I was reaching out to paint brands, and could suggest being able to spin up a brand-specific site to showcase their paint colours. I didn’t get any responses, so now I’m thinking about it differently.

I have a few ideas that I’m working on that can be built from the Swatcher API. I’m pretty excited to explore this, and I’ll post updates if it goes anywhere. Otherwise, you won’t hear from me for a good few months.