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.