I Built a Freezer Inventory App from My Couch

Voice memo → texts → bespoke freezer inventory app. Total cost: $0.

The Problem

You’re at the store, staring at the meat section, wondering if you already have ground beef at home. You do. Three packages. You just can’t remember.

How It Happened

Step 1: Sent a voice memo to my OpenClaw agent. Opened the freezer, rifled through it, narrated what I saw. “Two pounds of ground beef, a bag of frozen shrimp, some chicken thighs…” — stream of consciousness.

Step 2: Texted the freezer dimensions.

Step 3: “Build me a dockerized CRUD app for tracking what’s in the freezer, and make sure it starts with my computer. Create an algorithm to estimate the current capacity, which should roughly work out to 85% full which is how much my freezer is actually full in real life.”

That was the spec. The agent installed speech-to-text models to transcribe the voice memo, then spun up a full-stack app — database, API, frontend — containerized and running on the Mac Mini.

Iterating Over iMessage

Once running, I sent a few more messages:

“Add natural language input.” It runs a tiny 3B language model locally via Ollama — type “about three and a half pounds of frozen shrimp from costco” and it parses that into structured inventory. No dropdowns, no fifteen-field forms, no API costs.
“Set up Tailscale so my wife can access it.” Secure remote access, no port forwarding, nothing exposed to the internet. She opens a link on her phone, sees the freezer contents.

The Math

Build cost: $0. Runs on my Mac Mini.
Ongoing cost: $0. No cloud hosting. No subscriptions.
Time: A few text messages across an evening.

I didn’t clone a boilerplate or spend a weekend on it. I described what I wanted in plain English and got a working application.

Why This Matters

Nobody is putting a freezer inventory app on the App Store. It’s too niche, too personal, too specific. That’s exactly the point.

This is bespoke software — built because I needed it, running on hardware I own. The era of “there’s no app for that” is over. Your agent doesn’t care about market size. It just builds the thing.

The interface for commissioning this software? SMS. No terminal, no GitHub, no deployment pipeline. Text your computer what you want.

The Code

The whole thing is open source: github.com/Ryan-Haines/freezer-tracker

Get Started

If you don’t have a Mac Mini yet, go order one. As of this writing, lead time is about 3 weeks.

Setup guide: 24 Hours with OpenClaw