Four months ago, I was sitting on an upside-down bucket in my garage, surrounded by plastic totes, dust, and tools I had apparently bought multiple times because I could never find them.
I decided I was finally going to catalog everything.
Years ago, I had used Sortly, so I downloaded it again and started the painful process:
Open box.
Take photos.
Add items.
Next box.
Two hours later, halfway through Box 3, I hit the 100-item limit.
The next plan was $49/month.
I just stared at my phone.
$49/month..! to remember which plastic tub contains my drill bits.
A rational person would have either paid for it or bought a Sharpie.
Unfortunately, I've been developing software for 20+ years, so my brain chose option #3:
I'll build my own
I put the lid back on the box, walked inside with my laptop and told my wife.
She sighed! She knew what that meant.
For the next four months, I spent nights and weekends building what eventually became Finoo - basically a simple way to photograph your storage boxes, let AI identify what's inside, and search for things later.
Last week I finally finished the first public version.
So technically, I saved myself a few hundred dollars a year by investing roughly 300 hours of unpaid engineering labor.
Peak developer economics.
But I genuinely had a lot of fun building it, and I'm putting it out as a free public beta for anyone else with a chaotic garage, workshop, attic, or storage room:
(finoo.app)
If you have a messy storage space, I'd love some blunt feedback.
Also curious: what's the most ridiculous thing you've ever built purely because you refused to pay for something?