The problem
Household grocery inventory usually lives in three unreliable places: a half-remembered mental list, the back of the refrigerator, and a cabinet where something expired during a previous presidential administration.
InventoryImp is designed to make inventory tracking practical enough to use between real grocery trips. It gives people a clear view of what they own, simple ways to add items, and a path toward meal and grocery planning based on actual inventory.
What I am building
InventoryImp is a Next.js application for managing household grocery inventory.
The Free plan focuses on the core inventory loop:
- Search for packaged products by name or barcode.
- Add produce, bulk items, and pantry items manually.
- Import a structured grocery list for review before saving.
- Track quantities, categories, locations, product details, and purchase history.
InventoryImp Home adds AI-assisted household planning features:
- Scan a receipt photo to create an editable item draft.
- Paste receipt text or a grocery list for AI-assisted parsing.
- Generate recipe suggestions from tracked ingredients.
- Build grocery plans from low-stock items and planned meals.
Core interactions
- Review imported or parsed items before anything is saved.
- Add new products, update quantities, or merge an item into existing inventory.
- Use manual entry for the ordinary, messy reality of produce and bulk groceries.
- See Free and Home features clearly rather than discovering a limitation only after doing the work.
- Route users to pricing when they select an AI feature that requires InventoryImp Home.
Engineering focus
- Next.js App Router, TypeScript, and responsive Tailwind UI.
- Clerk authentication, including dedicated sign-in and sign-up routes.
- Clerk feature entitlements to distinguish Free and Home capabilities.
- Prisma and PostgreSQL data modeling for inventory items, quantities, and purchase history.
- Product search through barcode and food-data sources.
- Receipt-import workflows that validate data and require human review before saving.
Why it matters
The interesting part of InventoryImp is not inventory CRUD by itself. It is designing a tool that remains useful when groceries are purchased in a hurry, labels are inconsistent, quantities are approximate, and nobody wants to spend Sunday evening doing database administration for cheese.
The Free/Home split is also intentional: basic inventory tracking stays accessible, while AI-assisted receipt parsing and household planning are clearly presented as higher-value features with real operating costs.
Next steps
Finish and verify the Free/Home entitlement flow, enforce AI access in the server-side receipt-processing action, stabilize Google sign-in redirects, then build the first recipe-suggestion and grocery-planning workflows.