Introducing PartPlanner

We build our own products at Pattform, not just products for other people, and PartPlanner is the first one. It is live, it has real users, and it is the clearest example we have of how we work. This is the story of what it is, what it taught us, and where it is going.

What is PartPlanner?

PartPlanner is an app for people who build and flip PCs. If you buy parts in bulk, put builds together, and sell them on, you end up managing a surprising amount: hardware you own, half-finished builds, listings across marketplaces, and the running maths of what each part cost against what it sold for.

Most people track all of that in spreadsheets that fall out of date the moment a part moves. PartPlanner puts it in one place. You track the parts you own, plan builds from stock you actually have rather than a wishlist, and see part-out margins as you go, so the call to build, sell whole, or sell in pieces is backed by real numbers. You can read more on the PartPlanner project page, or just try it yourself.

What did building it teach us?

PartPlanner is where most of Pattform’s reusable capability was first built and proven. Almost none of it came off the shelf. We built authentication, teams and permissions on our own backend and library, a custom inventory engine, subscription payments, a marketing website, an app that works across desktop and mobile, a CMS for the blog, a CRM for marketing, and analytics.

The lesson was not any single feature. It was that once you have built something properly, you should never have to build it from scratch again. So we extracted every one of those into a reusable pattern. The payoff is real and measurable: work that took a couple of weeks the first time now takes a couple of days, because the next product starts from a proven foundation instead of a blank page. That is the engine behind everything else Pattform builds, our own products and our partner work alike.

Who is using it?

People are already using PartPlanner well beyond New Zealand, where we are based. It has users in the United States, the United Kingdom and Canada, and that number grows most days. For a young product from a small New Zealand studio, reaching builders and flippers on the other side of the world is exactly the kind of early signal we hoped for.

Because it is a web app, there was nothing to install and nothing to region-lock. Someone in Ohio or Manchester or Toronto opens the same link and gets the same product as someone in Wellington.

How does it stay so cheap to run?

Here is the part we are quietly proud of. Growing internationally usually means a growing hosting bill, sized for your busiest possible moment and paid for around the clock. PartPlanner does not work that way.

The services behind it are built to scale to zero. When nobody is using a part of the app, it costs nothing, and it comes back the instant someone needs it. Our costs track what is actually happening rather than what might happen, so the bill stays lean and sustainable even as the user base spreads across time zones. A quiet night in one country is a busy morning in another, and we only ever pay for the use that is real.

That is a deliberate choice, and it is why a small studio can run a growing international product without a cost base that eats the whole thing.

Where next?

PartPlanner keeps improving, guided by the people actually using it, and the patterns it produced keep making everything else we build faster. If you build or flip PCs, give it a go. If you have a product idea of your own, this is a fair picture of how we would build it, so get in touch.