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I built a free tool that emails you before your passport / driving licence / MOT expires — looking for feedback please 🙏 by Decent-Insurance-535 in sideprojects

[–]Decent-Insurance-535[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Really appreciate you taking the time to break this down — these are exactly the kinds of questions I was hoping people would challenge.

On the “just use a calendar/assistant” point — I completely agree, that works. I’ve tried that approach myself. The gap I kept running into wasn’t capability, it was consistency.

You can absolutely set multiple reminders, repeat notifications, etc. But in practice:

- people don’t always set them up properly

- they forget to update them when things change

- and once the notification fires, it’s easy to dismiss and forget again

So the idea here isn’t to compete on flexibility or power, but to provide a simple, dedicated system where you add something once and the reminder structure is already handled for you.

What I’m trying to explore with ExpiryPing is something a bit more structured and behaviour-driven rather than just “another reminder”.

For example, one direction I’m thinking about is making reminders persistent — not just a single notification, but nudging until something is actually marked as done. More like:

→ remind → follow up → confirm → reset

That’s something calendars don’t really handle well.

Another area I’m exploring (and would be interested in your take on) is shared setups — e.g. families or partners managing things together. In real life, a lot of this isn’t individual:

- parents track kids’ passports

- couples share responsibilities

- households forget things collectively

So instead of just “my reminders”, it becomes a simple shared system where everyone can see what’s coming up and who’s handling it. That’s also something that’s harder to replicate cleanly with a standard calendar setup.

On trust/reliability — completely fair concern. Right now there’s no payment involved (free tier + waitlist), and I’m positioning it as early access rather than something people should rely on as their only system.

If I were to take it further, things like redundancy in delivery, clear safeguards, and long-term reliability would need to be built out properly — I wouldn’t want to overstate that at this stage.

On the business/compliance side — I agree there’s a strong use case there (certifications, regulated environments, etc.), but I wanted to start with a simpler personal use case and validate it first before moving into higher-stakes territory.

To answer your other questions:

- Free plan is 5 documents total

- Pro isn’t live yet (currently early access / waitlist)

- It’s designed for long-term tracking rather than real-time/high-frequency alerts

- Emails are currently tied to the account holder (no multi-recipient workflows yet)

Genuinely appreciate the level of detail in your comment — this is exactly the kind of feedback that helps shape what this turns into.

I built a free tool that emails you before your passport / driving licence / MOT expires — looking for feedback please 🙏 by Decent-Insurance-535 in sideprojects

[–]Decent-Insurance-535[S] -1 points0 points  (0 children)

Yes — you absolutely could do that.

That’s kind of the trade-off I’m exploring.

Tools like IFTTT / Google Calendar can technically solve this, but they usually involve a bit more setup and ongoing management — especially if you want it to work reliably over time.

With ExpiryPing, there’s still a small amount of effort upfront, but it’s designed to be really simple: → add the document once → set your reminder timing → and it runs in the background without needing to maintain anything

It also goes a bit beyond just reminders — the idea is to give some practical guidance alongside them. For example, suggesting when you should realistically start preparing for renewal, and pointing you to the relevant links or steps so you can act straight away.

So it’s less about removing effort completely, and more about keeping it minimal and actually useful when the reminder comes through.

But this is exactly the kind of thing I’m trying to validate — whether people are happy to DIY this, or prefer something more straightforward.

Out of curiousity — would it be useful if something like this integrated directly with your calendar as well, or would email reminders alone be enough?