Reelic is now in open beta, and here's why we built it
Reelic is a Chrome extension that turns your Instagram saved reels into a private, searchable library. Today, after 2 weeks of building it for myself, it is in open beta. Free, no account, no waitlist. Install it and it works.
The reel I could not find
I had saved a 30-second clip of someone making weeknight pasta. Brown butter, sage, a pinch of nutmeg. I went looking for it on a Wednesday at 6:42pm with onions already in the pan, and Instagram showed me a wall of every reel I had ever saved, ordered by nothing I could control.
I scrolled for four minutes. I gave up. I made boring pasta.
That night I opened the saves page in Chrome DevTools, saw that every reel I had ever saved was right there in the page, and realised the problem was not a missing feature. It was a missing interface.
What Reelic is, in one sentence
A Chrome extension that reads the saves page you already have open and turns it into a Wrap, a leaderboard, and a search engine. Everything runs on-device. Nothing leaves your browser.
If that sentence sounds boring, that is by design. The point of Reelic is that the magic should feel routine. You open Instagram. You hit a shortcut. You find the reel.
What is in the beta
The beta is feature-complete for the loop that matters: index, search, retrieve. On top of that we have shipped four things that came out of dogfooding for 2 weeks.
Insta Wrap. A 10-slide story of how you curate, generated from your year of saves. Total saves, top vibe, taste twin, curator tier, global rank. Auto-plays. Shares as a PNG.
Global leaderboard. See where you rank among Reelic users by total saves. Your row stays pinned at the top.
Taste twin. Compares your top creators and hashtags against every other Reelic user and surfaces the one whose feed mirrors yours most.
Search every saved reel. Fuzzy match across captions, hashtags, and handles. Typos welcomed. Runs entirely in your browser.
What open beta means here
A few things it does not mean. No waitlist: install from the Chrome Web Store and you are in. No account: we never ask for one because we never need one. No paywall: Reelic is free during the beta. When we ship paid tiers, anyone who used the beta keeps the beta feature set free.
A few things it does mean. The UI will move: we will iterate on the side panel layout, the Wrap visual, and the in-page search bar based on what beta users actually use. Edge cases will surface: if Instagram changes their saves page tomorrow, Reelic might miss a few reels until we ship an update. Updates roll out automatically through the Chrome Web Store.
How to help us ship faster
Three asks, in order of impact.
Install it and use it for a real query. Not a fake one. The next time you cannot find a reel, open Reelic and search for it. Tell us what worked and what did not.
Save the bugs as you find them. The Support link in the footer takes you to a form. Two lines is enough.
Share the Wrap once your library indexes. It is the easiest way for someone to understand what Reelic does without us writing a single word.
Reelic is a small team building a tool we use every day. Open beta means we get to build it with you, not for you. We are glad you are here.
