A desktop tool a 30-person team now uses every day.

The problem I wanted to solve

The team was doing this by hand: checking whether a requested product configuration could actually be manufactured, sketching what it would look like, and estimating what it would cost to pack and ship. Manual, repeated, error-prone — and important enough that the company had previously paid an outside developer over $4,000 for a single module of this workflow. What they got back was less capable than what one module of this tool does now.

What it actually produces

• rule
  Configuration validationPhysical product parameters go in; the tool determines which configurations are actually manufacturable before anyone commits to one.
• preview
  2D previews, generatedEvery valid configuration gets a preview — what it will look like, before anything is made.
• local_shipping
  Realistic packaging & shippingThe tool calculates how the result actually packs and what it actually costs to ship — numbers the team can quote from.

Deployed, not demoed

This didn't go straight from my machine into someone's workflow. It went through formal testing by a specialist department before deployment — and it's now in daily production use across a 30-person team. That last part is the real benchmark: internal tools live or die on whether people actually keep using them once the novelty wears off.

How it feels to use

1. Enter the product parametersThe physical specifics of what's being requested.
2. See what's actually buildableInvalid configurations are caught immediately; valid ones get a 2D preview.
3. Quote with real numbersPackaging and shipping calculated realistically — not estimated from memory.

Why this one is different

The comparison point isn't hypothetical. The company had already bought one piece of this from an outside developer for over $4,000 — and the full tool the team now uses daily replaced it with something more capable. Custom internal software has a reputation for being expensive and fragile; done right, it's the opposite: one tool, matched exactly to how the team actually works, used every single day.

A note on scope: this tool was built for a client's internal use and is covered by a confidentiality agreement. This post describes the approach — not the company, industry specifics, or internal process it operates in.