sandbox
jack in the sandbox
Party rental quote desk
One short form, three quotes from local rental companies, no spam. The vendor emails, their replies and the comparison all run through one inbox. The most engineered thing in the factory. It never launched; it's live now as a demo that can't reach a real person.
Renting a tent and forty chairs for a backyard party means calling three companies, leaving three voicemails and comparing three quotes written three different ways. The idea: fill in one form, and we do the calling.
How it works
A four-step form takes the event, what you need, a budget and how to reach you. The lead lands in an admin view. From there, one click emails a vendor with a reply-to address that carries the quote's ID. When the vendor replies, the email provider posts it to a webhook, which checks the signature, matches the ID, files the quote against the lead and pings me. Once the replies are in, the comparison goes to the customer in one email.
Around that sits the part that was meant to bring people in. Fifteen neighborhood pages with their own copy, and a plan for 285 guide pages on costs and checklists, written by Claude from a structured brief and saved as drafts for a human to read first. A scraper pulled one vendor's catalog so the guides could name real products.
Why it never launched
The factory's own board put it plainly: most engineering effort of any project, no deploy yet. The round trip with vendors needed vendors, and the vendor list never got a single email address. Without that, a quote desk is a contact form with extra steps. The software was ready long before the part that would have made it a business.
The demo, built to be safe in public
It's live now as a demo, and getting there was its own small project in demo readiness:
- Nothing can reach a real person. The vendors are fictional, the database is an in-memory copy seeded on every cold start, outbound network calls are blocked in the app, and every email that would have gone out lands in a demo outbox instead. That outbox is the fallback path, and it's the best way to see the round trip.
- The admin is open, so a reviewer can follow a lead from the form to the vendor email without a password. Editing vendors does nothing.
- It can't run up a bill. It scales to zero, sits behind rate limits, and refuses any request that didn't come through the front door. A budget alert at $5 triggers a small function that takes the demo private on its own.
- It was checked like a product. Four QA passes at phone and desktop widths fixed a layout that zoomed out on phones, admin tables cut off on small screens, a clipped circular badge, and a chart that crashed on load.