One person. On purpose.
I have too many hobbies. Photography, electronics, DIY, woodworking, metalwork. Every one of them arrives with its own pile of parts, tools and half-finished projects, and all of it ends up spread across a house, a garage and a workshop. I built Locately because I could never find any of it.
Then there was my wife's Etsy shop, which is the same problem wearing a different hat: stock, materials and packaging that a storefront counts badly or does not count at all. I did not want two systems. I wanted one tool that could handle a drawer of drill bits and a shelf of orders without pretending they were different problems.
I'm an engineer, and I've spent over a decade building software that has to work outside a demo. My background runs across the full stack and into hardware: firmware for systems people depend on daily, data-intensive platforms built to stay up under real load, and the payment and backend infrastructure businesses run their operations on. Inventory turns out to need all of it, because it lives in the physical and the digital world at once.
So I built an early version for myself. It stopped being a side project somewhere around the point I started using it every week, and it became obvious the problem was not specific to me. Anyone with a garage, a craft room or a stockroom has the same one. That is why it is public rather than sitting on my own phone.
It is early on purpose. I would rather build Locately close to the people who use it, shaped by what they actually need, than guess in private and ship something confident and wrong.
Who you are buying from
There is no company behind Locately. It is sold by Dilina G., working as an individual in Toronto, Canada. Saying so plainly matters more than it would for a funded startup, because when you buy a founding seat you are sending money to a person rather than to a business.
Payments run through Stripe, so card details never reach me or this site, and the conditions page spells out exactly what a seat covers in plain English. No small print, because there is no legal department here to write any.
Mail to [email protected] reaches me directly. Not a support queue, not a shared inbox.
Why this gets finished
The first version already exists.I built it for my own workshop and my wife's shop, and I use it every week. Locately is not a concept looking for funding. It is a tool I already depend on, being made good enough to hand to other people.
That is also the honest answer to the question people ask about one-person products. My own workshop does not stop needing to be findable, and neither does the shop. The reason to keep building this does not depend on how the launch goes, which is more than most funded startups can say.
The founding cohort is what turns my tool into a product. It funds the work, and it decides what gets built next: the survey you fill in on the way through is not a formality, it is the roadmap. You are buying early access and a say in the direction, at a price that exists only because you are early.
And you are covered the entire way. Full refund on request until the beta opens, no reason needed. I hold that open because I am confident about shipping, not because I expect you to use it. It is what lets you back this now rather than waiting to find out.
Back the person, not the pitch deck.
The first 100 people pay $99 once and never pay again. 100 of 100 seats left, refundable in full until the beta opens.