qrakr

When someone finds a lost wallet, a set of keys or a pet, they usually want to give it back. But they have no safe way to reach the owner. A phone number written on a tag goes to any stranger. Trackers show where an item is, but they do not help a finder return it.

qrakr is for travellers, people who carry things they care about every day, and pet owners. A finder scans the sticker, needs no app and no account, and the two sides talk through qrakr instead of swapping numbers.

1. The finder scans the QR sticker with their phone camera and lands on the item's public found page.
2. The page records the scan and receives a short lived pass that works for this one item only.
3. When the finder taps "I found this", a serverless function saves the report, opens a private conversation and creates the alert in one all or nothing database step.
4. Once the finder has their answer, the function sends the owner an email alert in the background.
5. The owner reads the alert, which never contains the finder's contact details.
6. The owner replies in a private chat inside the qrakr app.
7. The finder sees the reply appear live on the same found page, still with no real contact details shared.

• Chose phone features only on the paid plan, including phone verification itself over free text messages and phone verification for everyone

  Every text, even each verification code, is a message I pay for. Putting the gate on verification means a free account can never cost money before it pays.

• Chose masked texts and calls through a small shared pool of Telnyx numbers, with the finder dialling in over asking the finder for their phone number, or building on Twilio

  Neither side ever sees a real number, and qrakr never stores a finder's phone at all. Telnyx gave the same masking for texts and calls at a lower cost.

• Chose a REST API described in one OpenAPI file that everything else follows over tRPC or GraphQL

  Stripe and Telnyx call in from outside, and a future mobile app must share the same API. The app's types are generated from that one file, so any mismatch fails the build instead of reaching a user.

From an agreed API plan to taking payments

3 weeks

Automated tests on the business rules

388

Riskiest modules held at 100% test coverage

10

qrakr has been live at qrakr.com since July 2026 with paying customers. It is now run by Qrakr Inc., a federal Canadian company, with a published privacy policy and terms of service.

Next is a shop selling printed sticker packs in Canada, which is ready and waiting on printing. After that, I plan AI designed tags that look like artwork rather than a plain black and white square, so people are happy to put them on things they care about.