About Stilltide - AI-Powered Equipment Evaluation SaaS
Stilltide turns machinery photos into priced resale reports in minutes.
The opportunity I built Stilltide to solve a pain point I lived through firsthand as a used machinery rep: pricing and writing up incoming equipment is slow, repetitive, and bottlenecked on the one or two people in the building who actually know what a 2015 Bartelt is worth. Reps lose hours per machine to spec lookups, comp searches, and listing copy. Multiply that across a dealer's weekly intake and the labor cost is significant. Stilltide compresses that workflow into a photo upload and a few minutes of AI processing. The product is fully built, in production, and ready for an operator with the time and network to take it to market. I have first-hand domain knowledge of the buyer but no runway to chase distribution myself - bills are due and I need to focus on paid work. What it does A production-ready SaaS for the industrial machinery resale market. Users upload photos and documents of used equipment, and a two-phase Gemini AI pipeline returns a polished evaluation report containing: Equipment identification (make, model, year, serial number) Condition assessment with notes Market pricing range backed by real comparables Ready-to-publish marketing copy for resale listings PDF and Excel export What's live today (Basic and Pro tiers) The Single Machine and Package/System evaluation flows are fully live and usable end-to-end. A user can sign up, run a real evaluation, pay, and export a report. Evaluation pipeline Drag-and-drop upload for photos and documents Two-phase Gemini pipeline: equipment extraction (make, model, year, serial, specs, condition) followed by market research (pricing range, comparables, marketing copy) Single Machine evaluations (Basic and Pro) Package and System evaluations (Pro): Gemini Vision groups multi-machine photos, detects production flow, and generates linked per-machine reports plus a combined summary Generated reports viewable in the browser One-click PDF export and Excel export Account and billing Email/password auth with email verification, password reset, and account deletion Free trial with starter credits Stripe-powered subscriptions (Basic and Pro tiers) Credit-pack top-ups Idempotent Stripe webhook handling Billing portal, plan switching, trial banners User experience Dashboard with evaluation history Evaluation detail pages with editable fields File preview, upload progress, and validation Adaptive header, responsive layout, dark-mode-ready shadcn/ui components Transactional email via Resend (auth flows + evaluation-ready notifications) Operator tooling In-app issue submission wizard with GitHub sync (bug reports and feature requests flow straight into a GitHub repo) Release-version checker that prompts users to refresh when a new version ships Sentry error tracking and performance monitoring Support FAQ, Terms, Privacy, and Contact pages Built but gated (ready to switch on) Auction Lot evaluations: parent-child evaluation structure for large mixed lots Team-tier credit allocations and seeded test accounts already in the schema Where the real money is The current Basic and Pro tiers are aimed at individual sellers and small shops. The bigger prize is the dealer channel. Used machinery dealers already pay $500-$2,000/month for CRMs and inventory tools that don't touch the evaluation workflow at all. A Stilltide tier built around team seats, dealer-system integrations, and labor-hours-saved as the headline metric is, in my judgment, a $1,000-$2,000/month per-account product. The infrastructure for multi-seat usage, auction lots, and Team-tier billing is already built into the codebase, just not yet public-facing. A buyer with dealer relationships, a sales motion, or industry connections is positioned to capture this directly. Tech stack Frontend: Next.js 16 (App Router, TypeScript, Tailwind v4, shadcn/ui) on Vercel Backend: Express + TypeScript on Fly.io Database: Supabase (PostgreSQL, Auth, Storage, RLS, Edge Functions) AI: Google Gemini 2.5 Flash Payments: Stripe (subscriptions, credit packs, webhooks) Email: Resend via Supabase Edge Function Monitoring: Sentry CI/CD: GitHub Actions (lint, typecheck, 754+ vitest tests, release-gated production deploys) What's included Full source code (frontend, backend, Supabase migrations, edge functions) 8-table Postgres schema with row-level security Tiered billing system with credit balances and trial flow Stripe integration with idempotent webhook handling AI pipeline: photo grouping, flow detection, equipment extraction, market research PDF/Excel report export Issue tracker with GitHub sync Release management API 754+ tests, deployment runbooks, architecture diagrams, key rotation guide Domain and brand assets Knowledge transfer call to walk through the codebase, billing logic, and what I learned about the buyer from inside the industry Traction No paying users yet. The product is fully built and live, but I have not run distribution. This is a build-complete, sales-incomplete asset. Reason for sale I have the domain knowledge...
Project details
Built with: TypeScript,MDX,PLpgSQL,CSS,JavaScript,Dockerfile
Website: https://stilltide.us
Next step: <p>My own roadmap, if I'd had the runway, was to go direct to used machinery dealers and integrate Stilltide into their existing systems so evaluations flow automatically into their listings. The pitch is simple: a dealer's intake team spends real hours per machine on spec lookups, comp pricing, and listing copy. Stilltide collapses that to a photo upload. Tie it into their inventory or DMS and the labor savings sell themselves at $1,000-$2,000/month per account.</p><p><br></p><p>That's the path I see clearly because I lived inside that workflow. A buyer with broader vision will likely see angles I don't:</p><p><br></p><p>- **Dealer channel (my path):** Direct sales into used machinery dealers, brokers, and auction houses. Build out the Team tier (already scaffolded), add per-seat permissions, and pursue integrations with dealer inventory systems and CRMs.</p><p>- **API / white-label:** Sell the evaluation engine as an API to existing equipment marketplaces (MachineryTrader, Surplus Record, IronPlanet) so their sellers get instant evaluations on upload.</p><p>- **Adjacent verticals:** The pipeline architecture is not specific to industrial machinery. Construction equipment, agricultural equipment, commercial kitchen equipment, restaurant FF&E, fitness equipment - any high-value used-goods market with fragmented pricing data is reachable with prompt and comp-source changes.</p><p>- **Insurance and lending:** Equipment lenders and insurers need fast, defensible valuations for collateral and claims. The same pipeline reframed as a valuation API is a different product with a different price point.</p><p>- **SEO content moat:** Two blog posts are live and the site is indexed. A buyer who runs even a basic content motion targeting "what is X equipment worth" queries can build a real organic funnel - those searches are high-intent and underserved.</p><p>- **Marketplace play:** Pivot from tool to marketplace. Sellers list equipment with auto-generated evaluations, buyers browse priced inventory. The evaluation engine becomes the moat, not the product.</p><p>- **Outbound to auctioneers:** Industrial auctioneers run dozens of lots per event and need fast cataloging. The Auction Lot evaluation type (built but gated) is purpose-shaped for them.</p><p><br></p><p>The codebase is built to be extended. The AI pipeline is modular, the schema supports multi-item evaluations and parent-child relationships, billing is credit-based and easy to retier, and the deployment pipeline is clean. A buyer with relationships, distribution, or vision in any of the above directions has a real asset to build on.</p><p><br></p>