It translates a contemplated price into working-life hours and ten-year opportunity cost, then uses product information and negative reviews to question the purchase.
Role
Product, design, and engineering
Period
Current
Status
Live
Disciplines
Product, AI systems, UX/UI, Engineering
The conversation starts with whatever purchase is on the person's mind.
01 · Context
What prompted it
Purchase tools usually help people find and buy products. nottoobad is designed around the opposite moment: deciding whether the purchase deserves to happen at all.
The product needs enough personal financial context to make the conversation useful while keeping sensitive data protected and the verdict independent from monetization.
02 · Approach
How it works
Center the experience on an open, streaming conversation with a narrowly scoped financial conscience rather than a rigid questionnaire.
Give the AI explicit tools to save financial context, inspect a product, calculate financial impact, and present a structured verdict.
Keep provider code behind a neutral model layer and protect user-scoped data with row-level security and server-side encryption.
03 · Decisions
Choices along the way
01
Shipped
Make the conscience conversational
Constraint
A fixed sequence cannot adapt to the purchase or the person's financial situation.
Choice
Use a continuous, purpose-scoped chat in which the model decides when its financial and product tools add value.
Result
A purchase can begin with free text or an optional product URL instead of a mandatory form flow.
02
Shipped
Translate price into lived cost
Constraint
A price alone does not show what a purchase costs in the buyer's own life.
Choice
Calculate hours of working life and ten-year opportunity cost from the user's financial context.
Result
The conversation can express the trade-off in personal time and foregone growth, not only currency.
03
Shipped
Keep the verdict blind to monetization
Constraint
The product's value depends on trusting advice that may recommend not buying.
Choice
Generate the verdict independently from affiliate or payment incentives and place the free-session wall after value is delivered.
Result
The recommendation remains structurally separate from monetization.
04 · Current version
Where it is now
A live multilingual product with streaming chat and passwordless authentication.
Product inspection, financial calculations, conversation history, and structured verdicts are connected through model tools.
Financial profile data is user-scoped, with the hourly rate encrypted before storage.
