Since we moved to storage-based pricing — $5/month for your first 5GB, scaling in $5 increments from there — what you actually store matters directly to your bill. So we looked hard at where storage was being spent, and one pattern stood out immediately: the same file, saved over and over, inside a single account.
Image boards and forums are the clearest example. A popular image gets reposted across a dozen different threads — sometimes the exact same file, sometimes just re-uploaded under a new filename. Archive ten threads from the same board over a few weeks, and it's completely normal for the same handful of images and videos to show up five or six times each, under five or six different URLs. Every one of those, until now, was a completely separate download taking up its own separate space.
It's not just image boards. A site's logo, a shared header image, a common CSS file — the same asset shows up on every page you save from that domain. None of it is a bug in how archiving works; it's just what happens when "save this page" and "save this page again from somewhere else" both end up wanting the exact same bytes.
The Starchive now recognizes when two downloaded assets — anywhere across your library, regardless of which page or thread they came from — are byte-for-byte identical, and stores that content exactly once. Every archive that references it still works exactly the same as before: nothing about how you browse, view, or share an archive changes. Behind the scenes, instead of each archive holding its own copy, they each hold a lightweight pointer to the one real copy.
Identity is based on the actual file content, not the URL or filename — which matters, because the same image reposted somewhere else almost never keeps the same filename. Two completely different-looking URLs pointing at pixel-identical files are recognized as the same thing and only ever billed once.
Storage that used to count five or six times over now counts once. For anyone whose library leans heavily on image boards, forums, or any site where content gets reposted, that's a real, ongoing reduction in what shows up on the Billing page — not a one-time cleanup, but something that keeps paying off as your library grows. There's nothing to turn on and nothing to configure; it applies automatically to everything you archive from here on.
One honest limitation: this only applies going forward. Anything already sitting in your library before this shipped stays exactly as it was archived — we didn't want to touch existing data as part of a background change like this without being a lot more careful about it first. If that's something you'd benefit from, let us know.
Archive as much of an image board, forum, or site as you want — reposts and shared assets only ever count once. Start a free 14-day trial, no credit card required.