Nightcap — A Liquor Brand on GrabMart
Nightcap is a liquor retail business based in Pasay, Metro Manila, operating exclusively through GrabMart Philippines. Their catalog spans over 1,184 SKUs — wines, spirits, beers, mixers, and grocery items.
A significant portion of revenue comes from bundle products: curated combinations of individual items sold together as a single listing on Grab. The business is managed by owners who also hold full-time jobs as flight attendants — meaning any system built had to run as automatically as possible.
"We needed a system that works while we're 30,000 feet in the air."
2 Years of Inventory Chaos
GrabMart treats every listing — whether a single product or a bundle — as an independent SKU. When a bundle sells, GrabMart only decrements the bundle's own stock count. It has no native mechanism to deduct stock from the individual component items that make up the bundle.
Stock discrepancies accumulated daily across 50+ bundle products
Manual Google Sheets tracking proved too tedious and error-prone
No reliable way to know actual available stock at any point in time
Items randomly marked out of stock by Grab even when stock was available
Risk of overselling increased constantly as discrepancies compounded
The problem had persisted unresolved for over two years
Vibe Coding with AI — No Developers Needed
Rather than purchasing an off-the-shelf inventory tool (none of which solve the bundle deduction problem anyway), the decision was made to build a custom system through vibe coding — an approach where a non-technical business owner builds functional software by collaborating iteratively with an AI assistant.
The entire system was designed, built, debugged, and deployed through a single ongoing conversation with Claude (Anthropic). No prior coding experience was required. The business owner followed instructions, copied and ran code, and provided feedback at each step.
"The entire project proves that technical skill is no longer the barrier to building software."
5 Core Components
All 1,184 products imported from GrabMart CSV into Supabase via a custom Node.js script. Idempotent — safe to run multiple times.
Identifies bundle products and maps their component recipes. Handles multi-product bundles and quantity bundles natively.
Since Grab's API isn't available to merchants, the team uploads their daily receipts PDF. The engine extracts orders, matches items with 4-level fuzzy matching, and deducts stock automatically — in under 30 seconds.
Full-featured web dashboard: 1,184 SKUs with live stock, bundle alerts, sales tracking, restock history, undo system, and COGS tracking. Accessible from any device worldwide.
Deployed to Railway — permanent public URL, 24/7 accessible, auto-deploys from GitHub on every push.
Calendar showing daily upload streaks and completion rate — keeps the team accountable to daily stock reconciliation.
What It's Built With
| Technology | Component | Purpose |
|---|---|---|
| Supabase | Database | PostgreSQL cloud storage for all inventory data |
| Node.js + csv-parse | Import Script | Bulk import from GrabMart CSV export |
| Vanilla HTML/JS | Bundle Tagger | Web app for mapping bundle recipes |
| HTML/JS + pdfjs | Dashboard | Live inventory + PDF order processing |
| GitHub | Version Control | Code hosting and deployment trigger |
| Railway | Hosting | 24/7 cloud deployment (~$5/month) |
| GrabMart PDF Receipts | API Workaround | Daily order data source |
| Claude by Anthropic | AI Co-Builder | Full system design, build, and debug |
All 3 Phases Shipped
What Made This Hard
What Changed After Launch
What This Proves
This project demonstrates that the barrier to custom software development has fundamentally changed. Problems that would previously require hiring a development agency at significant cost can now be solved iteratively by business owners themselves — with AI as the technical co-builder.
Most importantly, the system is fully owned by the business. No vendor lock-ins. No per-SKU fees. No dependency on a third-party tool that could change pricing or discontinue a feature.
"A non-technical business owner can build and deploy production-grade software through AI-assisted vibe coding — without writing a single line of code from scratch."
— AroVerse by Studio Fabillar · 2026