Knowing it is the shoe, and knowing which part

We have no idea, and we are not going to guess. Holetell reads a sock. It makes no judgement about the health of nails or skin, it performs no analysis of arches, foot shape or pressure, and it never infers how you walk or anything about your body from where a sock has worn through.

There is no facility here for a photograph of a body, and there is not going to be one. If anything about your feet, your nails or any pain is on your mind, that belongs with a podiatrist or a doctor, not with a tool that looks at knitwear.

A nail appears in our reasoning in one role only: a hard object that can sit against the inside of the knit. That is a statement about an object touching fabric, and it stops there.

Usually not. Of the five things that wear a sock through, four of them are not the sock: a pressure point inside the shoe, a hard edge in contact with the knit, cumulative heat from tumble drying, and the absence of reinforcement at the point that failed — and of those, only the last is something you choose when you buy.

One cause genuinely is the material: shorter fibres that pill and carry thickness away. That one shows up as several thin patches arriving together rather than one hole in one place, and for that one, a different pair does change the outcome.

So the honest answer is: a different brand is the right move in roughly one case out of the six positions we read, and the wrong move in the rest — where it costs you the price of the socks and puts you back here in two months with a hole in the same place. Every reading tells you which of the two you are in, and says so in plain words.

They are stored against your account so that you can look at a past reading, and they are deleted when you delete the reading or close the account. You can delete any reading yourself at any time, and deletion removes the images as well as the result.

Your photographs are not used to train models. Not ours, not anyone else's. That is stated in the Privacy Policy and in the Terms, and it is not a setting that can be quietly changed.

We accept photographs of socks. We do not accept photographs of feet, and there is no upload facility through which such a photograph could be submitted.

It is a reading of position and shape, and it is not a test. What decides which of the five causes is really doing it is often something we cannot see: which shoes these are worn with, how far you walk, how they are washed, how long the pair has been in service. Every reading lists those out, plainly, under what this cannot know.

The ranking itself is computed from a fixed reference table, in your browser, from the position and the break shape. A model is used to locate the damage on the sock and describe the shape of the opening. It does not rank the causes and it does not reach the conclusion.

Treat the result as a shortlist and a place to start looking, which is why every reading ends with something specific to go and check rather than with a verdict.

You cancel from the billing page, in one step, with no call and no email and no retention flow. Cancellation stops the next payment and you keep access until the end of the period you have already paid for.

You have 14 days to change your mind after subscribing, under the Consumer Contracts (Information, Cancellation and Additional Charges) Regulations 2013. If you asked us to start straight away and acknowledged that starting straight away ends that right, then it ends once the service has been supplied — those two acknowledgements are separate, unticked boxes at checkout, and we repeat both back to you in the order confirmation email.

We also give you a fresh 14 days after each renewal, which is not yet required of us. See the Cancellation & Refunds page for the full position, including the statutory cancellation form.

An allowance is how much of the service you may use in the month it belongs to. A question costs 1, locating the damage from your photographs costs 2, and the position diagram with the check list costs 5.

It does not roll over. Unused allowance resets at the start of each period.

There are no credit packs, no top-ups and no stored balance. An allowance is not money, not stored value, not redeemable for cash, non-transferable. If you run out, you wait for the reset or move up a tier.

One close-up of the damage, filling the frame, with roughly a hand's width of fabric around it — that is what the position and the shape of the break are read from.

One of the whole sock laid flat on a plain surface, seen from above. That is what locates the damage on the sock, and it is also where any reinforcement is visible.

Daylight, no flash, sock alone. Nothing else needs to be in the frame, and nothing else should be.

No. We recommend no sock brand and no footwear brand, and we reach no conclusion about the quality of any product.

Where the material is part of the reading, we describe it as a material — shorter fibres pill and lose thickness — which is a neutral description of how yarn behaves and not an accusation about anything you own.

We also ask you not to use a reading as evidence in a return, a complaint or a quality claim against anyone. It is not built for that and it would not be fair to the other side.

Anyone aged 18 or over can hold an account. It is not intended for children, and we do not knowingly collect data from anyone under 18.

It works anywhere. Prices are in US dollars and include VAT at the UK standard rate of 20%.

Yes, and it is meant to be printed. The check list exists so you can take it to the shoe and work down it, and on Trace and above it prints to a single sheet with the navigation and the decoration stripped out.

It prints in black on white so it survives any printer, and the annotation dots become hollow rings rather than solid ones so they still read without colour.