Restock planning for vending machine operators

The idea

Vending is a booming side-hustle niche with a huge YouTube and TikTok scene, and operators with 5 to 30 machines run entirely on memory: guess what the machines need, buy it at Costco, discover machine 7 was still full and machine 12 sold out of Takis five days ago. Every wrong guess is either wasted van stock or an empty slot earning nothing.

Enterprise vending software like Cantaloupe assumes telemetry hardware and fleet pricing, miles above this market. The wedge is par levels plus arithmetic: slot maps drive a consolidated pick list before the route, observed stock at each visit drives velocity numbers after it, and within a month the operator learns which slots, machines, and stops actually make money.

Who pays

The buyer is the independent operator, often part-time and growing, paying $29/mo because it saves a Costco guessing game every week and surfaces dead machines that were quietly losing the route money. Distribution is unusually easy: the niche is dominated by a handful of large YouTube and TikTok creators who teach vending as a business and monetise recommendations; sponsor them.

MVP scope

• Machine profiles with slot-level product, capacity, and par
• Route-day pick list aggregated by product across selected machines
• Mobile service screen for stock counts, fill-to-par, and jams
• Per-stop cash and cashless logging
• Velocity-based flags: dead slots, weak machines, par suggestions
• Skip for v1: card-reader or telemetry integrations, route optimisation and maps, supplier ordering, employee driver accounts, commission tracking for locations

Build ParRoute, a restock planner for independent vending machine operators. Stack: Next.js App Router, Supabase (Postgres, magic-link auth). Bill with Stripe Checkout.

Core flow: the operator sets up each machine with a location and a slot map: product per slot, capacity, and par level. Before a route day, they pick which machines they're visiting and the app generates a consolidated pick list: total units of each product to load into the van, purchasable straight off the list at Costco, plus a per-machine breakdown. At each stop, the mobile service screen shows that machine's slots; the operator enters observed remaining stock (or taps a filled-to-par shortcut), logs the cash and cashless takings, and notes any jams. Over visits, the app computes per-slot sales velocity from the stock deltas and starts flagging problems: dead slots that never sell, machines whose takings per visit don't justify the stop, and suggested par adjustments.

Pages: machines list with per-machine profitability, slot map editor, route-day builder with the consolidated pick list, mobile service screen, cash log per stop, product catalogue with cost and price for margin, billing.

Implementation details: the pick list must aggregate across machines by product, not per machine, because vans get loaded by product case; make the service screen work offline with sync, since machine locations often have no signal.

Pricing: $29/mo up to 30 machines, $59/mo unlimited, via Stripe.