Maintenix

What it is and why I built it

I maintain three family vehicles and wanted a single place to track what's been done, what's coming due, and what I've deliberately put off. The trigger was our daughter turning 16 and getting her own car. Suddenly I was managing maintenance across three vehicles instead of two, and keeping it all straight in my head wasn't going to scale.

I also wanted something that could protect me at the service counter. If a shop says I'm due for a transmission flush, I want to pull up the actual record in two taps and know whether that's true. And when I leave with a receipt, I wanted a way to feed it into the system without manually typing every line item.

Nothing I found did all of that without a subscription or handing my data to someone else, so I built it.

How it works

Maintenix is a self-hosted web app. You log in, and the dashboard shows every vehicle as a card with its current mileage, next scheduled service, and anything you've been putting off (flagged in amber so it's hard to ignore).

Each vehicle has a full maintenance timeline organized by mileage intervals. To get started, you paste the maintenance schedule from your owner's manual and AI parses it into structured intervals and line items. That's the only time the app calls an external service, and it costs roughly a penny.

When you get work done, you close out the interval: mark each item as completed, deferred, or removed, fill in the visit details once, and everything gets logged together. Nothing can be left in limbo. Every item gets a disposition, which is intentional. Deferred items surface on their own tab so they stay visible until you deal with them.

Receipts can be attached to any service interval. The app can also parse a receipt with AI, extract the line items, and let you match them to scheduled services or create new entries. One receipt can generate multiple log entries in a single pass.

For anything unscheduled (a repair, a recall, adding accessories), ad hoc items let you log work outside the normal intervals.

The app generates a branded PDF export of a vehicle's full maintenance history, and it's installable as a PWA so it launches from your phone's home screen just like any other app.

Tech stack

• PHP, MySQL, progressive web app.
• Self-hosted on my own server. All data stays local.
• AI integration (Claude API) for schedule import and receipt parsing only.
• Dark theme with an amber accent inspired by a check-engine light.
• Typography: DM Sans, Bebas Neue, DM Mono.