Arqe

Arqé is a curated stock library of AI-generated visuals, not a prompt-your-own generator. The team produces and hand-selects the imagery; users browse and search it by keyword, tag or even colour, save finds into custom boards, and download full-resolution 4K files under a royalty-free commercial licence. The library is organised into visual territories (campaign, lifestyle, food & drink, fashion, conceptual), designed to feel cohesive across brand contexts, and grows every week.

On the engineering side, the core challenge was discovery at scale over a constantly growing image library. I built it as a React SPA on a Supabase backend, with search that goes beyond keywords into colour, indexing images by hue so results can be filtered visually. Fast browsing is served by lightweight WebP thumbnails while downloads serve secured, signed-URL 4K originals gated behind auth and an active subscription, so the split between a fast public browse experience and protected premium delivery had to be managed carefully.

The other hard part was the commercial and account layer. Billing runs on a simple subscription (monthly or annual, no tiers, no pay-per-image), integrated through Polar, with checkout, a customer portal, cancellation that preserves access to period end, and dunning for failed payments. On top of that sit board and collection management, download history, and a Google sign-in flow including a non-trivial email-change and account-linking path.

The result is a clean, low-distraction product users have praised for its restraint, one describing it as rescuing them from bloated, ad-cluttered inspiration tools.