folie and Pinterest
Checked 4 October 2026
Pinterest is where a lot of people start collecting design inspiration. It is free, it has an enormous pool of images, and its feed keeps showing you more.
folie has no feed. It only holds what you capture yourself, from any app or site on your Mac, filed by component, style, typefaces and colours.
Side by side
| Feature | folie | |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | A Mac menu-bar app. Press ⌘⇧7, drag a box over anything on screen, and the screenshot is filed. | A visual discovery network where you save pins to boards. |
| Price | $9 once at launch (first 100 copies), then $15. Two Macs $18, then $30. Three Macs $27, then $45. | Free to sign up. Paid for by advertising. |
| Where saves live | On your Mac: a folder of PNGs and one SQLite file. | On Pinterest's servers, as pins on your boards. |
| Account | None. | Yes. |
| What you can save | Anything visible on your screen, including apps and pages behind a login. | Images and pins from the web and from other people's boards. |
| Ads | None. | Yes, promoted pins sit among the results. |
Competitor details are from their own pages, linked at the bottom, as they read on 4 October 2026. Prices change; check theirs before you decide.
Where Pinterest is better
- Discovery. Pinterest shows you work you would never have found on your own. folie does not.
- It is free and runs everywhere.
- Boards are easy to share with a client or a team.
folie is Mac only, has no phone app, does not sync between machines, and needs either your own Claude API key (about a tenth of a cent a capture) or a model running on your Mac.
Where folie is different
- It keeps what you actually saw, at full resolution, including logged-in dashboards and native apps that never appear on Pinterest.
- Every capture remembers its page, its real typefaces, its five colours and its text.
- No feed, no ads, nothing to scroll. Your library is a folder on your Mac.
Which one to pick
Use Pinterest to find things. Use folie to keep the interfaces you meet in your own work, with the details you would otherwise have to dig out again.
Questions
Can folie save from Pinterest?
It can capture anything on your screen, Pinterest included. It does not connect to your Pinterest account or import boards.
Is folie free like Pinterest?
No. It is a one-time purchase: $9 at launch for the first 100 copies, then $15. You also bring your own Claude API key, or run a model on your Mac.
Sources
Checked 4 October 2026. If something here is wrong or out of date, it will be corrected.
Other comparisons are on the alternatives page.