Storypole: a renovation budget and schedule tracker that runs offline with no account

Storypole is a free renovation budget and schedule tracker. You enter your costs, payments, contractors and phases, and it tells you where the money is going and whether your finish date is real.

The reason it exists: I spent years around enterprise construction. On a big job nobody starts without a critical path, committed vs paid tracking, and a contingency you actually protect. On a renovation all of that collapses into a spreadsheet and a group chat, and the budget slips before anyone notices.

How it is built, since that tends to be the question here:

• One self-contained HTML file. No backend, no accounts, no database.

• Data lives in the browser with an optional backup file the user owns. Optional sync runs through their own Google Drive, so I never hold anyone's data.

• It works fully offline, which matters when you are standing in a half-gutted basement with no signal.

• The free tier is a real tier. One project, every feature, no time limit. A one time $29 covers multiple properties and sync.

Where it actually stands: I launched on Product Hunt and got 3 upvotes. Google shows the site for four search queries. I have close to no users. The product is a long way ahead of the distribution.

What I think the problem is: my users are homeowners and small contractors, and none of them are on Product Hunt or here. I have been marketing where launching is easy rather than where my users are.

What I am trying next: free guides that rank for what people actually search, a budget template anyone can download without handing over an email, and outreach to the blogs that already publish renovation app roundups.

If you have sold software to a non-technical, non-startup audience, I would like to hear how you found them. That is the part I keep getting wrong.

storypole.app