Totes of Love.
A monthly care-package subscription for college students — curated boxes, corporate gifting, and the delivery tracking behind both.
Overview
A subscription box, plus all the unglamorous infrastructure a subscription box actually needs.
The Problem
Sending something thoughtful to a college student is harder than it should be. Parents want to send more than money; students want something that doesn’t feel like a chore to receive. Doing it well every month, by hand, from a dorm-room address list, does not scale.
What I Built
A consumer site with monthly and prepaid plans, a corporate gifting track for interns and campus recruiting, and Tote Track — a delivery dashboard tying orders to carrier tracking. Pricing is server-authoritative, so the browser never gets a vote on what something costs.
Why It Matters
The boxes are the fun part; the ordering, payments, and shipping are what decide whether it survives its first busy month. I built the second part first.
Tech stack
- HTML · CSS · JavaScript no framework
- Vercel Functions checkout, corporate intake, admin, tracking
- Supabase Postgres row-level security
- Stripe PaymentIntents & subscriptions
- Shippo shipping & carrier tracking
Screenshots
Changelog
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Dropped the 26-and-over age bracket — it wasn’t who the box is for — and standardised on US spelling across the site.
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Retired the 12-month plan and replaced vague box descriptions with the actual named products inside each one. Easier to price, easier to trust.
- Added the analytics beacon
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Migrated off Firebase onto Vercel serverless functions with a Supabase Postgres database behind row-level security, then wrote the stack and its security invariants down in the README so future-me can’t quietly break them.
Timeline
- Started Co-owned from day one.
- First build Storefront, checkout, and Tote Track.
- Re-platformed Vercel + Supabase.
- First boxes ship The real deadline.