Questions, answered.
Direct answers, kept short and kept honest. Anything unanswered here reaches the founder at hello@therotation.ai.
What is The Rotation?
The Rotation is a private register for watch collectors — one accurate record of what you own, what you wear, and what you are hunting. It keeps references, serial numbers, photographs, wear history and values in the form a claim or a police report asks for, and it identifies watches from photographs, checked against its own reference catalogue. It is not a marketplace. It is an iPhone app, and through the phone it also checks how a watch is running and whether it has met a magnet.
Is The Rotation a marketplace?
No. Nothing here is for sale, nothing is brokered, and nobody earns anything when you sell. The register has no opinion about whether you should.
How does the photograph identification work?
A frontier vision model reads the photograph the way a collector would — the printed line beneath the maker’s name, the colour of the metal, the reference engraved between the lugs. Every candidate is then checked against the register’s own records; where two references are near-identical, the register works out what actually separates that pair and puts that single question back to the model. When the evidence supports no single answer, it declines to give one. The full route is described in what the AI touches.
Is my collection private?
Yes. Your register is written to your device the instant you change it, and follows you to your other devices second — never the other way round. Nothing about your collection is published or listed anywhere, and there is no profile of you to find. There is one exception, and it is only ever by your own hand: you can draw a card for a single watch — an address you give to a broker, a watchmaker or a buyer, showing that one record and nothing else. It never shows what you paid, it closes on a date you set, and you can withdraw it at any moment. The privacy notice sets out the detail.
Can I show one watch to someone?
Yes, one at a time and never more. You draw a card for a single watch: an address that shows that one record and nothing else, for seven, fourteen or thirty days. It never shows what you paid, and it carries nothing about your wear log or the rest of your collection. You can withdraw it at any moment and the address stops working at once. There is no public profile, no directory, and no way from a card to anything else you own.
Which watches does the register know?
The reference catalogue holds more than 3,400 references across 57 makers as of September 2026, assembled from the makers’ own published pages, and it grows every week. A maker’s numbering conventions are learned from the records themselves — including the conventions abandoned decades ago. Where the register does not know, it says so.
What does membership cost?
From version 1.1.2 of the iPhone app, a register of three watches is free, with their photographs, the Eye within a daily allowance, their wear log, the bench and the compass. Membership is £8 a month or £82 a year, begun in the iPhone app, and keeps the whole collection, the bench’s voices, the Registrar, the importer, and the Eye and photographs for the wishlist. The first seven days of a first membership are free, then Apple takes the price shown. The website does not sell memberships at present. Reading and exporting your register stay free either way. The terms of membership are published already.
Can I use it for insurance?
That is much of the point. The register keeps the details an insurer or a police report actually asks for — reference, serial number, photographs, values — and your records export as a single file that is yours to keep. What any particular insurer will accept is between you and them: we keep the record, we do not underwrite it.
Is there an app?
Yes. The Rotation is an iPhone app for iOS 17 or later, listed on the App Store as The Rotation. Watch Collection. Accounts are opened and kept in the app; this website is its front door, not a second register.