I moved to a new neighborhood in San Diego and asked ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini my trash pickup day. They all hallucinated. The city's official lookup is a Salesforce app behind reCAPTCHA that barely works on mobile.
So I built trashalert.io — and mapped 954K addresses across San Diego and Austin.
What it does: - Type your address → instant fuzzy match against 954K addresses - Shows collection day, next pickup dates, which bins to put out - Auto-adjusts for holiday shifts - Generates .ics calendar files for any address - Night-before email reminders - 80+ neighborhood SEO pages
Tech: Next.js 15 / TypeScript / Supabase (Postgres) / Vercel / Resend
The interesting problem: ~19,000 US municipalities, each with different waste haulers, schedules, and data formats. Most don't publish machine-readable data. I'm building a crowdsource pipeline where residents submit their schedule and we verify against public records.
Built as a solo founder with an AI ops lead running 24/7 on a Mac Mini. 233+ commits in 2 months.
The thesis: municipal data is one of the last un-aggregated data sets. Trash day is the wedge — street sweeping, recycling changes, water shutoffs all use the same address→schedule architecture.
Free, no ads, community-powered. Would love feedback.