Questions,
answered.

You post a short notice — what it is, where it was last seen, and any private identifiers like a serial or microchip number. From that moment two things are true: your notice is public and searchable, pinned to a coarse area rather than an address, and anyone who finds the item can message you privately through FoundWall without either of you exposing a phone number or an email.

The private identifiers are stored, never published. They are what lets you prove the item is yours later. You stay in control of the notice and can mark it recovered — or take it down — at any time.

YESPosting to the registry is free, and there is no paid tier in the product today. Reporting a lost bike, pet, mower or drone costs nothing, searching costs nothing, and messaging a reporter costs nothing. A registry only works if everyone can use it, so the front door stays open.

Anything with an identity you can describe — a serial, a chip, a distinctive mark, a face. Today that's mostly bikes, pets, robot mowers and drones, because those have clear identifiers and an active resale market. If your item has a number stamped on it somewhere, it's a good fit.

The board is only as useful as the number of people who think to search it, so a downtown notice is seen by more eyes than a rural one on day one. That is honest rather than encouraging: FoundWall is new, and coverage grows block by block as more people register. Posting costs you two minutes either way, and a notice nobody reads today is still the record you produce when someone asks you to prove the item is yours.

NOWe don't sell, rent, or trade your personal information — not your contact details, not your location, not your item list. There's no ad broker in the loop and there are no advertising or analytics trackers in the product. How FoundWall will eventually pay for itself is not decided, and we would rather say that than invent a business model on a marketing page. If it ever becomes anything that touches your data, you'll hear it from us in plain language first.

Deliberately coarse. Your last-seen point is rounded to an area of at least 1.5 km before anyone else sees it — never an exact GPS coordinate, never your home address. The map shows a soft circle, not a pin. It's enough for a neighbour to think "I've seen that around here," and not enough to lead a stranger to your door.

Only you. Private identifiers are stored so you can prove the item is yours, and they're never shown on the public notice. You can optionally publish the last few characters as a fragment; the full number stays hidden either way. That way a thief can't scrub the one detail that settles an argument, and a finder can ask you to name it as a check.

No. Contact happens inside FoundWall, not in your public inbox. A finder messages the notice, not you directly, and you decide whether to reply and when to share more. Your real contact details stay hidden unless you choose to hand them over.

NOPlease don't. Believing you have found your item doesn't make a meetup safe. Recovering property can turn tense fast, and it's not worth your safety. Take what you have — the notice, the dates, the photos, the identifier you kept private — to the police, and let them arrange the recovery. FoundWall never contacts a seller on your behalf.

NONot yet, and we would rather say so plainly than imply otherwise. Nothing on FoundWall scans Kijiji, Facebook Marketplace, Craigslist or any other marketplace at the moment. Automated marketplace monitoring is the next thing on the roadmap and it is out of scope for the current release.

Where you see a watch panel or a match alert on this site, it is a labelled design preview of what we are building, not a live feed.

That is exactly why it hasn't shipped. The plan is to read public listings — the same ads anyone can open — with no hacking, no fake buyer accounts and no data behind a login. Each board still needs its own recorded basis for access: terms of use, rate limits, what may be retained and shown. No source has cleared that review yet, and none goes on until it does.

A possibility, never a verdict. The design is fixed even though the code isn't: an alert would read "this looks like yours, here's why," listing the signals that fired — frame shape, colour, model, a matching serial where one is readable — with a confidence you can weigh. A lot of charcoal gravel bikes look alike, so a weak resemblance would be flagged softly. We'd rather show you an honest maybe than pretend to a certainty we don't have.

A one-click downloadable summary is on the roadmap and is not built yet. What exists today is the notice itself: the case ID, the coarse area, the reported date, your photos and the identifiers you kept private, all on one page you can read out or show to an officer. Nothing is ever sent to police on your behalf.

No. There is no paid feature, no subscription and no billing in FoundWall today — no payment code exists in the product. If a paid option is ever introduced, posting, searching and messaging stay free, and the terms of anything paid will be published before it is charged for.

No. Anyone can search the public board to see whether a found item has already been reported, or to check before buying something secondhand. You only make an account when you want to post a notice or reply to one, so an item can be tied back to you.

Canada-first and nationwide: the board and search work anywhere in the country. The interface is English only right now — a French version is planned and has not shipped, so we've stopped advertising it as bilingual until it is.