I built a self-hosted inventory platform where you point your phone at your stuff and it figures out what it is, and helps you put it away. I need people to break it. Long version below.
The problem: I have way too much stuff. An ever-growing collection of 3D printers I mod and tinker on (if I had the time), tons of parts, servers, and computer hardware. And separately, food in my fridge that I forget about until it goes bad, which hurts the soul.
Instead of easing up on the Facebook Marketplace habit and throwing out half my stuff like a normal person, I started building an inventory app. First I gave it my 3D printers, then the mods, then I imported every receipt and invoice for the parts and derived line items from them, and it kept growing. About a week in I realized it was completely hardcoded to me and couldn't help anyone else. What might actually help other people was a platform where you design your own "10 apps under one roof" that no software company in their right mind would ever sell you, with no code.
4 months and not much sleep later, here is Cobblr! This 3-minute walkthrough shows it better than I can explain it: the yarn walkthrough.
Scan anything
The golden feature is that you can scan anything with your phone and Cobblr figures out what it is: a barcode, a photo of something, a receipt, the VIN on a car's door jamb, it all lands in the scan inbox, gets processed, and you just confirm it. When I get home from the store I photograph the receipt (or forward an email invoice) and that's it. The groceries setup is aimed squarely at the fridge problem: it comes with a "what's on hand" screen that's basically a vending machine view of your kitchen, quantity and a status dot on everything, and a use-it-or-lose-it list sorted by what expires first.
The whole point is that it's modular. Groceries, Lego, and yarn are all just inventory with different fields (the Lego walkthrough shows the same platform doing something completely different), which you can customize to your heart's content, and then you track it all under one roof. Same data underneath, so a saved view, a QR label, or an automation works the same on a ball of yarn, a bag of M3 screws, and your grocery items. Automations are a sentence you click together: when stock runs low, add it to the list. After that it runs itself. My own home inventory is just three modules turned on: Scanning, Inventory, and QR Labels.
QR labels are the other half
You decide what gets a label: I just do rooms and bins, but you can label individual items too, it's whatever you want. Print them from a cheap Bluetooth label printer straight from the browser, or turn on auto-print: scan something, Cobblr figures out what it is, and the printer shoots out a label for it while you reach for the next thing.
Scan the room or the bin QR, then scan the item, and Cobblr knows exactly where you put it. Later, scan that room, rack, or bin and it tells you what's inside. And when I've scanned a whole pile of stuff with nowhere to go yet, it plans where each thing should live and walks me through putting it away.
A little AI, and none of it required
Inside the app, a little AI helps a lot for things like photo identification, reading receipts, an assistant that can answer questions about your stuff and actually make changes to your workspace (it shows you the change before it lands, so you can say no), but everything still works without it, just more basic. I've found that Sonnet gave the most accurate responses, but the quickest free way is to hook up a Google AI Studio key and use Gemini Flash Lite, which hallucinates a little bit in chat but is super quick and still gets the job done. If you already run Ollama, you can also use that, or any OpenAI-compatible endpoint you want. There is a way to use your Claude subscription (assuming it's for your own personal use only) in a self-hosted setup, but that's a bit more work to set up.
There's also an opt-in barcode network I'm running where you get everyone else's barcode corrections and yours go back in, off by default like everything else that phones out. Nothing leaves your install unless you connect a provider yourself or approve the connection.
Where this is going
The home inventory stuff is what's most polished today because it's what I use daily, but what I'd really like to see happen is makers and small shop owners running their whole operation on the same platform, where your inventory, your machines, your jobs, and your orders live under one roof you set up yourself. The goal is that you set the whole thing up in one afternoon and it stays set, instead of you constantly babysitting a spreadsheet and three apps that don't talk to each other. Some of that is already implemented. Digifab support (sending jobs to 3D printers and laser cutters, watching for failed prints) is in and marked experimental, projects and purchasing exist, and a bunch more is in the works. If you run a shop or a makerspace and that sounds like your problem, I especially want to hear from you.
I just cut a new stable release (2026.8.1), but nightly is the place to be because I'm pushing new features constantly. I've spent weeks squashing bugs and making improvements toward this public release and announcement. I'm sure it's nowhere near perfect yet and there are still rough spots, but I can't just keep iterating on it by myself anymore. I'm looking for testers and users who have a thing they need to keep track of or a "custom disjointed dashboard or app" use case. There are 33 ready-made bundles, so one click installs the fields, units, and a view and you are adding your first item in about a minute. If you already use HomeBox or Part-DB, there are one-click importers. If you use one app for home inventory and another app for grocery tracking, I want you to be able to do all that under one roof in Cobblr.
Tell me what problem you need solved, on Discord or on the community forum, and if it's even remotely on brand I'll look at making it happen. I need real use cases from real users. The grocery tracking got good this way: a friend's family kept buying the same thing twice and never knew which snacks were in the pantry, and that one conversation produced the cadence module, the shared list, and the vending machine view. Most requests turn out to be 90% there already.
For people who are serious about testing this, I'm running my own hosted "cloud" instance that I'm happy to give access to, but you can self-host it yourself right now, it's the same codebase. The setup builder asks you a few questions and writes your .env for you (I've never had a self-hosted app do that for me), and the docs cover HTTPS, which you need for the phone camera to work. It should go pretty quick.
Regarding AI in this project
I'm an engineer that speaks software architecture and QA. The entire codebase is AI-written, on purpose. There's a lot of structure holding it up: a platform contract every module has to satisfy, hard module isolation (modules can't touch each other's tables, period), and nearly 200 lints enforcing all of it, plus about 2,500 tests that run on every PR. The code is rigid by design. A human would probably go a little crazy trying to add to it and get past all the rules, which is sort of the point. I spent my time on the architecture and on testing everything, and it's source-available, so feel free to look at the code yourself. A human graphic designer created Cobb the Assistant mascot, and I think he's absolutely adorable.
This first appeared on the community forum on 27 August 2026, where the discussion is.