If you've spent any time tracking the things you love — movies, books, music, restaurants — you've probably used a handful of apps. Maybe Letterboxd for films. Goodreads for books. Spotify playlists for music. A Notes app list for restaurants. Pinterest boards for everything else.
They all do one thing okay. None of them do the whole thing.
Stacks does.
One App, Everything You Love
The most obvious difference is scope. Letterboxd is for movies. Goodreads is for books. Spotify is for music. They're all walled gardens that only care about one category.
But your taste isn't siloed. The person who loves Aftersun probably also loves Phoebe Bridgers and Sally Rooney. The person who's obsessed with hole-in-the-wall ramen shops probably also has opinions about whiskey and jazz.
Stacks lets you curate across categories. Movies, books, music, restaurants, podcasts, games, gear, places — whatever matters to you, all on one shelf. Because taste is holistic, and your app should be too.
Social, Not Performative
Pinterest is a vision board. You pin aspirational things you'll never cook, wear, or build. There's no social layer worth talking about — it's you, alone, hoarding images.
Instagram is performative. You post to be seen, not to share what you genuinely love.
Goodreads has social features, but the experience is so clunky that most people use it as a private tracker and pretend the social layer doesn't exist.
Stacks is social in a way that actually matters. You follow people for their taste, not their selfies. Your feed shows you what the people you trust are discovering, watching, reading, and recommending. It's the digital equivalent of walking into a friend's apartment and scanning their bookshelf.
Taste Matching — Something Nobody Else Has
This is the feature that changes everything.
Stacks can tell you that your college roommate has a 91% taste overlap with you. Or that a stranger across the country shares 84% of your taste in movies. When that person adds something new to their shelf, you don't scroll past it — you pay attention.
No other app does this. Not Letterboxd. Not Goodreads. Not Pinterest. Not Spotify's algorithmic recommendations, which are built to serve you more of the same, not to connect you with actual humans who get you.
Taste matching turns strangers into trusted curators. It turns discovery from a chore into a gift.
Human Discovery, Not Algorithms
Speaking of algorithms — we don't use them.
Most recommendation engines are designed to keep you scrolling. They analyze your behavior and serve you more of what you already like, creating a feedback loop that narrows your world over time. The writer Kyle Chayka calls this Filterworld — a flattened culture where everything starts to look, sound, and taste the same.
Stacks takes the opposite approach. Discovery on Stacks is human-powered. You find new things because someone you trust — or someone whose taste you admire — put it on their shelf. There's no algorithm deciding what you see. No sponsored placements. No engagement optimization.
Just people sharing what they love.
No Ads. Not Now, Not Ever.
This isn't a growth-stage promise we'll quietly walk back later. It's a design principle.
Ads change incentives. The moment an app sells your attention, it starts optimizing for time-on-screen instead of value-delivered. Every design decision gets filtered through "will this keep them scrolling?"
We don't want that. We want you to open Stacks, find something great, and close it. Two minutes of real value beats two hours of empty scrolling.
Stacks makes money through affiliate links. When you discover a book on someone's shelf and buy it, we earn a small commission. You pay the same price. Our incentive is perfectly aligned with yours: help you find things you'll actually love.
The Shelf Is the Point
Here's the philosophical difference.
Most apps are built around consumption — what did you watch, rate, review? They turn culture into a checklist. Letterboxd even gets criticized for "gamifying" film watching, where logging movies becomes more important than experiencing them.
Stacks is built around curation. The act of putting something on your shelf is an endorsement. It says, "This is worth your time." You're not rating it out of five stars. You're not writing a review. You're simply saying: this matters to me.
That's more honest than any rating system. And it's more useful to your friends than a numerical score.
Who Stacks Is For
If any of this sounds like you, Stacks is your app:
- You've lost a recommendation in a group chat (everyone)
- You wish your friends could see what you're into without you having to post about it
- You've ever said "I need a Letterboxd but for everything"
- You're tired of algorithms deciding what you should watch, read, or listen to
- You want to discover things through people, not machines
- You care about your taste and want it to live somewhere beautiful
What We're Building
Stacks is still growing. We're a small team, and we're building this with intention — no rush to scale, no pressure to monetize your attention. Every feature we add is designed to make curation more joyful and discovery more human.
Shared stacks are coming soon. Richer taste matching. More categories. A web presence for every curator.
But the core will never change: your taste, on display, connected to people who get it.
No ads. No algorithms. Just great taste.
Stacks is free to download. Built by Red Collar. Get Stacks →