TallyStow

I keep picking things up off the side of the road. Power supplies, old monitors, bins of cables that might be worth something or might be garbage. They go in the garage. Then the basement. Then the shelf behind the workbench that I’ll definitely organize next weekend. Three months later I buy a SATA cable at Micro Center because I forgot I have forty of them in a blue bin somewhere.

TallyStow is the system that was supposed to prevent that. Point your phone at the thing. The AI identifies it — brand, model, condition, estimated street value. It gets cataloged, tagged, and filed. Later, when you’re standing in an aisle wondering if you already own one, you search. It’s in there. Blue bin #3, top shelf, garage.

The personalities

The AI isn’t one voice — it’s sixteen. Tally Stow handles intake: you show her a pile of parts and she emits clean, structured catalog entries. Tally Go is the eBay whisperer — she knows what to list, what to price, and what’s not worth the shipping label. Tally Fro is spatial memory — she knows where things are, where they’ve been, and why your multimeter keeps ending up in the kitchen.

There’s Tally No, who helps you let go of things. Tally Owe, who tracks loans. Tally Dough, who watches the money. Tally Grow, who manages the pantry. Sixteen personalities, each unlocking when they’re relevant, each with a distinct voice built on the same foundation rules. It’s a team, not a chatbot.

The network

This is where it gets interesting. Every TallyStow node generates an Ed25519 identity on first boot — a keypair, a Bech32 address, and a four-emoji fingerprint that is you on the network. Your node builds a “backpack” — a signed, versioned snapshot of the items you’re willing to share, sell, or lend — and gossips it to your friends. Their nodes gossip it further. No central server. No account. Just a trust graph and cryptographic signatures.

Your friend needs a power supply? Her node already has your inventory cached from the last backpack exchange. She searches, finds your Corsair CX550M, and the trust chain shows it’s one hop away — directly from you. Three hops out, the items are still there, but the trust diminishes. The protocol handles it.

The stack

One Go binary. No framework, no ORM — stdlib net/http with Go 1.22 route patterns, SQLite via modernc.org/sqlite (CGO-free, because cross-compilation matters), and a SvelteKit PWA embedded directly in the binary. Deploy is docker compose up. The AI connects to the self-hosted stack on xtower — Ollama for vision and language, Whisper for voice scanning, openedai-speech for the personalities to talk back.

No cloud. No API keys to a company that’ll change their pricing next quarter. Your inventory stays on your hardware.

The scanner station

The dream — and it’s getting close — is a physical station. Raspberry Pi with a camera, a thermal label printer, good lighting. Set something on the platform, the camera captures it from multiple angles, the AI identifies it, a QR label prints, you stick it on the bin. Walk away. The whole loop — capture, identify, catalog, label — in under a minute with zero typing.

The labels just arrived. The printer needs a 24V adapter. We’re close.

Why this exists

Everyone owns more than they can track. The usual answer is a spreadsheet, or a notes app, or a dedicated inventory tool that wants $10/month and stores your data on someone else’s server. TallyStow is the answer for people who’d rather own the system than rent it — who want the AI to do the tedious part while keeping everything on hardware they control.

It started because I kept buying things I already owned. It turned into a peer-to-peer inventory network with cryptographic identity and sixteen AI personalities. Scope creep is a feature when you’re building for yourself.