Who
I wanted a shipping-rate desk for e-commerce sellers: compare USPS, UPS, FedEx, print labels, stop guessing retail rates.
What I built instead is an honest stack spine: Clerk auth, Convex contacts, Resend lead email, Sentry, PostHog, and a Next 16 proxy.ts filename law. People who read PLAN.md, then open the tree, and do not pretend the carrier boxes are checked.
If you have ever named a repo after the product you meant to ship and then shipped the scaffolding that every later app copies, this is that receipt.
What
I built ShipThing. Package shipthing 0.1.0, public under michaelmonetized/shipthing. Layout metadata title: Shipthing. Description: Combining convex, posthog, clerk and sentry. That description is more accurate than the repo name.
Stack from the lockfile: Next.js 16.1.1, React 19.2.3, Tailwind 4, Bun, Clerk, Convex, Resend + React Email, Sentry (org hustle-launch, project shipthing), PostHog, zod 4, react-hook-form, Radix/shadcn UI. stripe sits in dependencies with a long .cursor/rules/STRIPE.md. Zero app imports. Thirty-nine commits. HEAD 9f91d97.
Surfaces that exist: / lead form ("Be the first to contact us!" / Send Message with name, 10-digit phone, email, message) plus signed-in Contacts table with delete; /login; /sentry-example-page; API routes /api/send/notification and /api/send/confirmation; proxy.ts Clerk middleware file; sitemap.ts / robots.ts.
Convex schema is a single contacts table. Search index on name, indexes by name/phone/email/page. Notification mail sends from Notifications <notify@uncap.us> to michaelmonetized@gmail.com and 8285931935@vtext.com. Confirmation is a short "Hey {name}, we received your message" React Email.
Navbar lists Security, Auth, Layout, Typography, Forms, Analytics, Error Tracking, Email, Realtime Data Sync, APIs, More. No /features/* pages in the tree. Footer still links Learn / Examples / nextjs.org from create-next-app.
PLAN.md still sells the other product: carrier APIs, rate comparison, ZPL/PDF labels, address validation, Shopify import, batch labels, tracking, cost analytics. Success metrics: active users > 500, monthly labels > 10,000, savings > 30%. Every checkbox is empty.
Where
Code: github.com/michaelmonetized/shipthing. Public. Live: shipthing.vercel.app (HTTP 200, Clerk signed-out chrome, X-Robots-Tag: index, follow).
Audience sits next to every "I'll bolt carriers on next sprint" SaaS skeleton. Sibling operator furniture: Fallow gate notes in AGENTS.md, Bun-only local law, Blacksmith/Vercel prebuilt rules, env.template for Clerk + Resend + Convex.
When
2025-03-22. Create Next App. Same day: Convex + PostHog + Sentry, not-found + shadcn button, middleware build thrash, Clerk, forms.
2025-03-26–27. Convex contacts land. Resend starts. Real bugs: could not access name in notification email, copy-pasta, split emails so sending stops after the first try/catch, more Resend fixes, light-mode toggle attempt.
2025-03-28–29. Navbar, error boundary, login. Then: convex dev, i finally recovered my github login 🎉.
2025-04. Layout components; box, stack, deck + Next update.
2025-12-29. React Server Components CVE pass.
2026-01-08. PLAN.md with shipping-rate "improvement opportunities." Jan 31 chore sync.
2026-02. CVE PR #1; rename middleware.ts to proxy.ts (#7); env.template (#8); proxy filename guardrail (#10); security headers (#11); sitemap + robots (#12).
2026-06-22. Nightly ×2.
2026-08-08. HEAD 9f91d97: set X-Robots-Tag to index, follow on Vercel.
Why
The shipping product needed a spine before it needed a carrier SDK, and the spine is what survived.
Next 16 renamed the middleware file. I wanted a script that fails if middleware.ts comes back (bun run check:proxy).
A lead form that emails me and texts 8285931935@vtext.com is a product loop I can prove. A FedEx rate matrix I never integrated is not.
Naming the repo ShipThing and leaving PLAN.md full of unchecked USPS boxes is more useful as an operator story than as a fake launch post.
When your PLAN.md still lists the vertical and your layout.tsx description lists the stack, which one should the blog title obey?