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What Stealsy actually does, and what it doesn’t

· 6 min read

A phone with small product pins floating out of its screen

Stealsy is a free iPhone app that turns a video into a shopping list. You share a TikTok or an Instagram reel to it from the share sheet, and it comes back with the products in that video: the name, the brand where a brand can be proven, the price, a shop link that a server opened and checked first, and a cheaper dupe where one exists.

That is the entire product. The rest of this is the detail, including the parts that do not work.

What comes back from one share

A catch is what the app calls the result of one share. Every catch holds the same five things, and every one of them is something you would otherwise assemble by hand across a dozen tabs:

A real example, because a description of output is less useful than output. Someone typed three lines into the app: a Dyson Airwrap, a pair of Samba OG in cloud white, and the Rhode peptide lip tint in raspberry jelly. The Airwrap came back at $499.99 to $649.99. The Shark FlexStyle came back at $219.99 to $299.99, sitting underneath it as a dupe. The Samba came back with a verified link on adidas.com rather than a marketplace listing that might be anyone.

Where a catch goes after

Into a closet, which is the app's word for the one place all of it lives. This is the quiet half of the product and the half people underrate: the finding problem is loud, but the losing problem is the one that actually costs you things. A screenshot of a jacket in a camera roll of four thousand photos is not a saved item. It is a photo you will scroll past in March.

You can also heart an item instead of buying it. The app watches that price and tells you when it drops, which turns wanting something you are not ready to pay for into a decision you can postpone without losing the item.

What it costs

Free to download, and free to use up to a fixed allowance: five catches, two saved bags, five watched prices. Stealsy Pro, a subscription, removes the caps. We are deliberately not printing the Pro price here, because a number written into an article goes stale and the App Store listing does not.

The subscription matters more than the number, because it decides what the app is loyal to. Stealsy carries no affiliate links and earns nothing when you buy. A shop appears because the evidence puts it there, not because it pays the most per click. That is also why the app has no checkout of its own: it hands you a link, and you buy on the shop's own site like a normal person. More on who builds it and why is on the about page.

What it does not do

The two free tools already on your phone

Before installing anything, know what your phone does for free.

Visual Intelligence. On iOS 26, Apple extended it to what is on your screen: take a screenshot, draw over an object in it, and it runs an image search on that object, using Google Image Search by default. It is genuinely good when the item is large, sharp and unobstructed, and it is one gesture. It is also a still image search, so it never hears the shade the creator said out loud. We wrote a longer piece on why image search struggles with video.

TikTok's own Find Similar.Pause the video, press and hold, and TikTok will try to recognise the item and show you similar ones. When it fires, nothing is faster. The word doing the work is “similar”: it surfaces comparable items in TikTok Shop rather than identifying the specific thing on screen and sending you to the brand. Creators can also turn the feature off on their own videos, so it is not available everywhere.

If either one gets you to the product, use it. They are free and they are already installed. The case for a separate app starts where those stop: a video with six products in it, a name said aloud and never written down, a shade that a lookalike photo will not settle, or a link you want checked before you type in a card.

Where it fails

Unbranded factory goods are the honest hard case. A ribbed knit top from a video, sold by forty sellers under forty names, has no “correct” answer to find. So is anything vintage, thrifted, or discontinued, where the item may exist only in resale listings written by people who did not know what they had. In those cases the useful output is a close match and the words to search with, and we would rather say that than dress a guess up as an identification.

Shade and variant are the other one. A tube shot for two seconds under a ring light is not enough to separate one shade from its sibling, and a sibling shade is a wrong answer rather than a close one. When the evidence does not settle the variant, the app should leave it open instead of picking.

Who this is for

Anyone who has typed “link?” under a video and never gotten one. That comment is the whole reason the app exists. It goes unanswered for boring reasons rather than rude ones, and the product in the video is still findable either way. The app is a faster way to do a thing you can absolutely do by hand.

Get Stealsy for iPhone — share a video, get the products, prices and verified links.

Common questions

What is Stealsy?
Stealsy is a free iPhone app that turns a video into a shopping list. You share a TikTok or Instagram post to it from the iOS share sheet, and it comes back with the products in that video: the product name, the brand where a brand can be proven, a price, a shop link that has been opened and checked by a server before you see it, and a cheaper dupe where one exists. It also accepts a plain link, a screenshot, or a typed description if you do not have the post itself. Everything you catch is saved in one place in the app, and you can ask it to watch an item's price and tell you when it falls. It requires an iPhone running iOS 18 or later; there is no Android app and no web version.
Is Stealsy free?
The app is free to download and free to use up to a fixed allowance: five catches, two saved bags, and five watched prices. A subscription called Stealsy Pro removes those caps. The subscription is the whole business model, which matters for a shopping app: Stealsy carries no affiliate links and earns nothing when you buy, so the shop it shows you is the one the evidence supports rather than the one paying the highest commission. For the current Pro price, check the App Store listing rather than an article, because a price written down in an article goes stale and the listing does not.
How is Stealsy different from Google Lens or Apple's Visual Intelligence?
Those tools search a still image. You freeze a frame, screenshot it, circle the object, and get back visually similar pictures, which works well when the object is large, sharp and unobstructed. A video carries evidence a still image throws away: the creator says the product name out loud, the caption and the on-screen text often name it, the comments argue about it, and the creator's own storefront frequently lists it. Stealsy reads those signals together rather than matching pixels alone, which is what makes a shade or a variant name recoverable. The trade is speed and reach. Visual search is one tap and free and works on anything in view, including a photo you took yourself.
Does Stealsy see the videos I watch?
No. It only processes a post you deliberately hand it through the share sheet, plus anything you paste or type in yourself. It does not connect to your TikTok or Instagram account, and it does not read your feed, your likes, or your saved posts. A share extension receives the item you shared with it and nothing else about the app you shared it from, which is a boundary iOS enforces rather than a promise an app makes.