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Show HN: I built a site to track your buy it for life items

costperuse.com

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Show HN: I built a site to track your buy it for life items

#1

Post by nahtnam »

Hey HN,

I've been on a mission to buy higher quality, sustainable products, especially when replacing things I use frequently. To better understand the value of these items, I built a site to track how often I use them. Here is my list so far: https://www.costperuse.com/@nahtnam

Feel free to sign up and share the items that have served you well! https://www.costperuse.com/

You can also generate a sharable link for X (Twitter), complete with an open-graph image of your stats. Example: https://x.com/nahtnam/status/1797875287793004947

If there's interest, I have plenty of ideas to improve the site. With enough data, I aim to create lists of the best BIFL (Buy It For Life) items in various categories.

Check it out and let me know what you think!

Show HN: I built a site to track your buy it for life items
costperuse.com

Re: Show HN: I built a site to track your buy it for life items

#2

Post by tithe »

Consider defining or showing a few examples on the landing page describing exactly what a "buy-it-for-life" item is.

I'm not sure if you mean items I'll be buying until death (like soap, toothpaste, and socks), or things I buy once and expect them to last for a lifetime.

I see the "ZSA - Moonlander" example, but I'm unsure how to interpret what I'm seeing: "Hours" means how long I've had this particular item? And for what I paid for it, "Cost per hour" is just that.

Congratulations on the launch!

Re: Show HN: I built a site to track your buy it for life items

#3

Post by nahtnam »

tithe wrote: post #2

Consider defining or showing a few examples on the landing page describing exactly what a "buy-it-for-life" item is. I'm not sure if you mean items I'll be buying until death (like soap, toothpaste, and socks), or things I buy once and expect them to last for a lifetime. I see the "ZSA - Moonlander" example, but I'm unsure how to interpret what I'm seeing: "Hours" means how long I've had this particular item? And for…

Thanks for the feedback, I'll working on improving the landing page! You're totally right though, it lacks explanations and examples

To answer your question here, BIFL (in my experience) means paying extra for a premium quality item that will last significantly longer than the cheaper alternative. However, in some cases, it's worth buying the cheaper item if you don't use it enough.

The ZSA Moonlander example is a product I spent the extra $$$ on, and in the end it was totally worth it given how many hours I've spent using the keyboard. I built the site to put into perspective what the value of the keyboard is. Would I spend ~$0.04 an hour to rent this keyboard? Definitely yes

Re: Show HN: I built a site to track your buy it for life items

#4

Post by KomoD »

nahtnam wrote: post #3
tithe wrote: post #2

Consider defining or showing a few examples on the landing page describing exactly what a "buy-it-for-life" item is. I'm not sure if you mean items I'll be buying until death (like soap, toothpaste, and socks), or things I buy once and expect them to last for a lifetime. I see the "ZSA - Moonlander" example, but I'm unsure how to interpret what I'm seeing: "Hours" means how long I've had this particular item? And for…

Thanks for the feedback, I'll working on improving the landing page! You're totally right though, it lacks explanations and examples To answer your question here, BIFL (in my experience) means paying extra for a premium quality item that will last significantly longer than the cheaper alternative. However, in some cases, it's worth buying the cheaper item if you don't use it enough. The ZSA Moonlander example is a pr…

It doesn't necessarily mean paying more, it just means products that are durable or made to last

Re: Show HN: I built a site to track your buy it for life items

#5

Post by nahtnam »

KomoD wrote: post #4
nahtnam wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the feedback, I'll working on improving the landing page! You're totally right though, it lacks explanations and examples To answer your question here, BIFL (in my experience) means paying extra for a premium quality item that will last significantly longer than the cheaper alternative. However, in some cases, it's worth buying the cheaper item if you don't use it enough. The ZSA Moonlander example is a pr…

It doesn't necessarily mean paying more, it just means products that are durable or made to last

True! Although I'd say there's usually a correlation between price and durability/quality

Here's an example of something cheap that's lasted me a long time: https://www.costperuse.com/@nahtnam/purchases/0018ace2-af37-... (I don't think they designed it to be durable, it just happened to be)

Re: Show HN: I built a site to track your buy it for life items

#8

Post by nahtnam »

dilliwal wrote: post #7

can't signup, redirects me to localhost. liked the concept

Sorry about that! I was getting some really bad cold starts on vercel (>1s) so I moved to fly.io, and my auth provider needed some additional configuration for docker based deployments that I missed
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