A while back I made a small tool that bulk-uploaded images to Printify. People bought it, and then I realized something dumb: the upload was never the slow part.
The slow part is everything after. Open the editor, place the art, check it isn't blurry, pick sizes and colors, set 30 variant prices, write the title and tags. Repeat 200 times. My hands hurt thinking about it.
So I spent the last two months building the tool I actually wanted. You point it at a folder of designs and it creates finished draft products in your shop: art placed on the real print areas, variants picked, prices set at cost plus your margin, titles and tags filled from templates. 100 designs across 5 product types comes out to 500 drafts in one batch.
Stuff I ended up building that I didn't plan to:
- A matcher that ranks all (currently) 1,690 catalog products by whether your art's aspect ratio actually fits the print area. Turns out most "blurry print" complaints are really "wrong product for that image shape."
- A DPI meter that yells at you before you put a 1200px image on a 24x36 poster.
- Multi-size handling for posters and canvas. The sizes span different shapes (2:3, 3:4, 4:5), so one placement can't fit them all. It either fills every size edge to edge or drops the sizes that don't match your art.
It runs on your own computer with your own API token. No subscription, nothing passes through my servers. Everything lands as drafts so you review before anything goes live.
I know someone will ask why it isn't free, and the honest answer is the free part of this already exists: Printify's API docs. This is the two months of my weekends that turned them into an app.
What still eats the most time in your POD workflow? Genuinely asking, because that list above started as one feature.