Today Pontata is live on Product Hunt. If you've ever stood in a paint aisle holding a 2-inch chip and trying to imagine it as an entire wall, this is for you — if you find it useful, an upvote helps more than you'd think for a small site on launch day.
Why "Pontata"
The name comes from fresco painting. A pontata is the section of a wall a painter finishes in a single session, before the plaster sets — one deliberate move that becomes permanent. Choosing a paint color has the same shape: it's a small decision that's expensive and annoying to undo once the wall is dry. We built Pontata for people who want to get that decision right the first time, not people who enjoy repainting.
The problem with paint chips
A swatch under store fluorescents tells you almost nothing about how a color will look on your walls, in your light, next to your floors and trim. Undertones that are invisible on a 2-inch card become obvious across an 8-foot wall. Manufacturer photos are usually a single glamour shot, styled and color-corrected, and they never show the color the way it actually reads on an overcast Tuesday.
The fix isn't a better swatch — it's more evidence. So Pontata is built around real, unstaged room photos: ~12,300 colors across 14 brands, backed by ~83,000 photos of those colors actually on walls, submitted by painters and homeowners rather than styled by a marketing team.
What's actually on the site
- Browse by color — every color, filterable by brand, hue, and brightness (light/medium/dark, based on LRV), with real room photos for each one.
- Browse by room — the same catalog sliced the other way: what colors actually look like in a living room, kitchen, or bedroom, not just on a chip.
- Compare pages — put two colors side by side with real photos, useful when you're deciding between two close options or two brands' take on "greige."
- Color match — find the closest equivalent to a color you already love, in a different brand, using actual Lab color distance rather than a marketing team's idea of "similar."
- Brands — all 14 brands in one place, since naming conventions and palettes vary a lot brand to brand and it's easy to lose track of who calls what what.
Everything is free to browse, ad-supported, and built to stay fast even as the catalog grows — it's currently around 160,000 indexed pages and growing as more brands and room photos get added.
If you're checking us out from Product Hunt
Welcome. The fastest way to get a feel for the site is to pick a room you're about to paint and browse it directly, or start from a color you're already considering and look at its real-room photos. And if Pontata solves a problem you've had standing in a paint aisle, we'd genuinely appreciate an upvote.