A while back we put our vehicle maintenance database on the open web — factory service schedules and cost estimates for over a thousand cars, free, no app required. It worked well enough that we did the same thing for every app that had a dataset worth sharing. This post is about that pattern, because it has quietly become how we think about building.
The pattern
Most of our apps are, underneath, a structured dataset plus a private place to track your own copy of it. Vehicle Story is a maintenance database plus your car’s history. Hone Literacy is a library of reading passages plus your own progress. The care apps are recurring-task schedules plus your own log.
The dataset is genuinely useful on its own — before you install anything. So we publish it twice:
- As an app — private, offline-first, backed up to your own iCloud. It remembers your car, your home, your reading.
- As a free web tool — the same underlying data, as plain pages anyone can read, no account and no email gate.
What’s on the open web now
The free tools live here, all built from the same databases the apps use:
- Vehicle maintenance schedules — over a thousand cars, motorcycles, and RVs, with intervals and U.S. shop costs
- Home maintenance and boat checklists — what to do, how often, what it costs
- Dog and cat care schedules in one pet hub, plus a houseplant care guide
- Reading practice — dozens of passages with comprehension questions, answers, and explanations
No paywall, no signup. The same data the apps run on, published cleanly.
Why give it away
Two reasons, stated plainly.
First, the information should be easy to find. A factory maintenance schedule lives in your owner’s manual and almost nowhere pleasant to read; a good reading passage with real questions is buried under ad-heavy worksheet sites. We already had the structured data, clean and checked. Publishing it costs us little and helps anyone, app or no app.
Second — honestly — we make the apps. A web page tells you what a 2015 Outback needs; Vehicle Story tells you when yours needs it and remembers what you’ve done. If the free pages are useful, some readers will want the version that does the remembering. That is the whole deal, and we would rather say it out loud than pretend the pages are charity.
One engine behind all of them
The part that makes this work as a two-person studio: we did not build ten websites. We built one small engine that turns a dataset into pages — a schedule becomes a table with intervals and costs, a task list becomes a checklist, a passage becomes a practice page — and each app just plugs its data into it. Adding the next app’s free tool is mostly a matter of pointing the engine at new data.
That is the same principle as the apps themselves: do the structural work once, then let data fill it. It is why a very small team can keep a fairly wide shelf.
What’s next
More apps are on the way, and each one that ships with a real dataset will get its free public version too. When we expand or correct a database — new models, revised intervals, more passages — the pages update at the same addresses, because they read from the same source the apps do.
If you find an error in any of it, tell us — it fixes the page and the app in one go.