Finding something new and finding something again are different jobs

Buy Savee if the problem is that you have run out of things to look at. Buy Coii Ref if the problem is that you have far too many and cannot find the eleven you need this afternoon. That is the whole comparison, and almost nobody arrives here needing both answers at once — you already know which of those two sentences describes your Tuesday.

The rest of this page is the detail underneath: what each one costs today, where Savee is straightforwardly the better tool, what a local index does that a hosted collection cannot, and the seam where using both works better than either alone.

The numbers, read off their site today

Checked on 3 September 2026, because a competitor's price in a paragraph is worth exactly as much as the date beside it.

Savee's upgrade page lists three plans:

• Pro — $9 a month billed yearly, with a note that the yearly option saves $36 against monthly.
• Pro & Portfolio — $15 a month billed yearly, adding a personal site with a custom domain.
• Teams — $12 per user a month billed yearly, the first two users included.

There is no free tier, and this is deliberate rather than an oversight: they wrote a post about it, which names the trial limit at 200 saves and explains that a free plan would mean the advertising business they do not want to run. Whatever you think of the conclusion, publishing the reasoning is more than most services do.

Their home page lists the platforms: the web, iOS, Android, extensions for Chrome, Safari, Firefox and Edge, and a Figma plugin. If you type the old address, savee.it answers with a permanent redirect to savee.com — same service, one fewer domain to remember.

Coii Ref, for the same paragraph: $19 once, three Macs, updates included, a thirty-day trial with every feature and no card and no account, macOS 11 Big Sur or later, native builds for Apple Silicon and Intel.

Where Savee is the better tool, and it is not close

It has things you have not seen. A local index has, by construction, never shown you anything new — every file it returns is a file you already saved. Savee's entire value is the opposite: a curated stream, filters over other people's collections, and a search that takes an image as the query. When the brief is vague and the folder is stale, none of what we do helps and all of what they do does.

Saving from the web is one click. Extensions for four browsers and mobile apps for both phones. Coii Ref has no browser extension and never will — it reads folders on disk and has no idea the web exists. Every page on this site about collecting from the internet is about what happens after the file has landed in a folder, which is a real limitation and not a positioning choice.

Boards other people can be in. Collaborative boards, comments, a Teams plan with roles. Coii Ref is a single-user desktop application with no accounts, no sharing links and no collaboration of any kind. If a client or an art director has to see the board inside the tool, we are the wrong tool.

It follows you between machines. A phone on a train, a borrowed laptop, a studio iMac — the collection is wherever you sign in. Coii Ref exists on the Mac that holds the folder, and nowhere else.

The API, the Figma plugin, the marketplace. Pro includes API access, which is more than most services in this category open up, and the Figma plugin puts references beside the artboard rather than in another window. We have no API and no plugins.

Concede all five, because all five are true, and because a comparison that pretends otherwise falls apart the first time the reader opens the other tab.

What a local index does instead

Here is the case, and it is narrow on purpose.

Somewhere on your Mac there are folders with four years of material in them: things clients sent, things you shot, screenshots, scans, downloads from a dozen services including this one, a Downloads folder you have never once tidied. Nobody tagged any of it. It is not in a service and it is not going into one, because uploading four years of other people's photographs to anybody's server is a decision with consequences.

Coii Ref points at that tree and indexes it where it sits. Files are not copied, not moved, not renamed. Then one line of search reaches all of it:

That is the query worth showing, because it is the query nobody can run against a service: it is asking about the untended majority of a collection. Keys are type ext tag rating is has no in width height added modified, AND across keys, OR inside a comma list, no parentheses. Anything the parser does not recognise becomes free text rather than an error, so results keep arriving while you are still typing.

Saved views store the text of a search and re-parse it when you open them, so renaming a tag updates every view that mentions it rather than leaving a stale list behind.

Boards that are files

The second half of the app is the canvas, and this is where the difference stops being about connectivity and starts being about format.

A board here is a .coii-canvas file in a folder you chose: pretty-printed JSON, which diffs in git, syncs with whatever you already sync with, and can be read without this application installed. There is no export command, because there was no import — the file has been yours since you saved it.

This is the one claim on the whole site a reader can verify with cat rather than take on trust, which is why it is the one worth leading with against any service. The question underneath "what happens if this shuts down" is not really about anyone's longevity. It is about what shape your work is in on a normal Tuesday, and that is checkable today.

Trials, and what each one is buying

Two thirty-day-ish promises, structured very differently, and both defensible.

Savee's trial is measured in saves rather than days: 200 of them, and then a membership. That is a coherent way to run a service where every save costs somebody storage and bandwidth forever, and the post explaining it is more candour than the category usually offers.

Coii Ref's trial is thirty days with every single feature switched on, no card and no account, because there is no server for a trial to cost us anything on. What is worth knowing is what happens on day thirty-one if you have not bought. One category of action stops, and it is the category that grows the library: registering a new folder, running the importer, kicking off an index pass by hand. Everything that reads carries on permanently — search, tags, ratings, saved views, canvases, thumbnails — and the folder watcher keeps running, so an unpaid copy does not sit there quietly letting your index go stale. It simply stops taking on more.

The difference in shape follows from the difference in cost. A service that holds your uploads pays for them every month for as long as you keep them, so it charges every month. An application that reads files already on your disk has no recurring cost to pass on, which is the entire reason $19 once is possible here — and equally the reason we cannot offer sync, sharing or a feed at any price without becoming a different sort of company.

The query line, in four lines

The part that is hard to convey without typing it. Each of these is one line, and each returns while you are still finishing it:

type:image width:>=3000 rating:>=4              big and good
in:Shoots tag:any:overcast,dusk                  either tag, one folder
type:video ext:mov,mp4 added:>2026-05            clips since May
has:notes no:tags                                written up, never filed

tag:any: is the OR; putting two different keys side by side is the AND. There are no parentheses and there is no query builder, because the point is to compose the question in the second you have it rather than in a dialog. An unrecognised word is treated as free text — the same thing the app does — so you never get an error page instead of a grid.

The last line there is the one that surprises people. has:notes no:tags finds everything you cared enough about to write on and never got round to filing, which in most libraries is a couple of hundred of your best references.

The table

Five rows in bold on their side. That is an accurate scorecard of two products that overlap on one word — reference — and on almost nothing else.

What switching actually costs, honestly

It is not a switch, and pages that pretend a discovery service and a local index are substitutes are the reason people stop trusting comparison pages.

What you can do is stop asking one tool to do both jobs. The seam that works in practice:

1. Keep saving to Savee while you are looking. That is what it is good at, and $9 a month for the looking is not the expensive part of anyone's month.
2. When an image graduates from interesting to I am working from this, it becomes a file in a folder on your Mac that means something to you — Clients/Ashgrove/Direction, not Downloads.
3. Point Coii Ref at the parent of those folders once. Everything already in there is searchable from that moment, tagged or not, including the four thousand things from before you had any system.
4. Build the board from the files. It saves beside them, as a file.

Time cost of step three: one index pass, which runs while you do something else, and which you never repeat — after that the watcher turns filesystem events into the smallest re-scan that makes the index true again. Rename a file in Finder and it stays the same item, with the same rating and the same notes attached.

Video, which is the row nobody checks

Worth a paragraph because it is where a lot of reference practices quietly break. A clip is not a first-class citizen in most tools: it lives in a different folder, opens in a different application, and does not appear when you search for the thing it shows.

Here it goes through the same index pass as a still. It carries the same tags and the same rating, answers the same query line — type:video ext:mov rating:>=4 is a sentence, not a special mode — and gets a proxy written at canvas resolution, so a board of footage scrolls the way a board of photographs does rather than stuttering while eight source files decode. If half of what you study is motion, that is the difference between two libraries and one.

What Coii Ref does not have

Stated flatly so the trial holds no surprises. No accounts, no cloud, no sync, no sharing links, no collaboration, no mobile app. No browser extension and no web clipper. No feed, no recommendations, no other people. No search by image and no search by meaning — the search is literal, over what is already true of your files. No automatic tagging of any kind. No PDFs, documents or 3D formats: images and video only. And macOS only, version 11 or later, which rules us out entirely if your work happens on more than one kind of computer.

Two things it does have that are easy to miss. Video is indexed in the same pass as stills, carries the same tags and ratings, answers the same query line, and gets proxies written at canvas resolution so a board of clips scrolls like a board of photographs. And the network list is two items long: a licence check when you press Activate, and one request at launch read only for its Date header, so that winding the clock back does not mint free trial days. No analytics, no crash reporting, no update check.

One more thing worth knowing before the trial: saved views are not folders and not smart albums in the usual sense. They store the text of a search and re-parse it every time you open one, which sounds like a technicality until you rename a tag and every view that mentioned it updates itself instead of quietly pointing at nothing.

Who should pick which

Savee if the bottleneck is input. You need to see work you would not have found, you save from the browser constantly, you want the collection on a phone, you share boards with people, or you want to build against it through the API. None of that is available here at any price.

Coii Ref if the bottleneck is retrieval. The material is already on your disk, there is too much of it to scroll, video belongs beside the stills, you work where the connection is unreliable, and you would rather the arrangement be a file you own than a row in somebody's database. $19 once, and nothing renews.

Both, which is what the seam above describes and what most people reading this actually want. They are not competing for the same hour of your day.

Neither, if the collection is small. Folders and Finder genuinely work up to a couple of thousand images, and the honest threshold for buying anything is the first time you cannot find something you are certain you saved.

Nearby, if this was not quite the question

If what you liked about Savee was the community and the curation, Pinterest does that at enormous scale for free and Are.na does it slowly and thoughtfully for $7 a month, and Cosmos is the one built around search by colour and visual similarity.

If what you want is a desktop application, the field is small and worth knowing: refern is the most capable of them at $35 once, with an on-device tagger and a search that finds images nobody tagged — neither of which we have — plus Windows and Linux builds; and Eagle takes your files into a managed library instead of reading them where they already are.

Otherwise: the library has the rest of the comparisons and the practical guides, and the trial runs thirty days with every feature, no card and no account — enough to index a real folder tree and find out whether searching your own disk is the half that has been missing.