Frigolo

Goal

It started with the milk. At home our shopping list lived in a WhatsApp chat, and every week the milk got lost in it: written on Monday, buried by Wednesday, forgotten at the till. As a designer, I couldn't leave it alone.

Frigolo is the shopping list I designed and built for the two of us - and then opened to everyone. One tap and a product is on the list, on every phone of the people you shop with, already in the order you walk the supermarket.

It had two lives. Three weeks as a private tool we used every day, then the question changed: if it works for us, why not for anyone? On 10 October 2026 Frigolo became a public, free, ad-free, open-source app, installable from a link. I ran it end to end - product, design, code, launch - leading a team of AI agents.

The Challenge

A shopping list is the simplest app there is, and almost every one of them gets something wrong. The gap was concrete:

• It is written at home and read in the aisle - typing on a keyboard with a basket on one arm is where lists die. Adding something had to cost one tap.
• Two people, one list - whoever is at the supermarket must see what was added a minute ago, without the "anything else?" message from the checkout queue.
• Supermarkets have an order, lists don't - a list in the order you wrote it sends you back and forth between the aisles, with the frozen peas melting in the basket.
• No signal in the cellar, none by the freezers - many supermarkets are concrete boxes. A list that needs the network fails exactly where it is used.
• Free usually means ads - most shopping lists are free with banners, brand offers inside the list, or a subscription to unlock sharing. I wanted none of it.

So the design problem was not "make a list". It was make the list disappear: one tap at home, zero thinking in the aisle.

One tap, in aisle order

A catalogue, not a keyboard. More than 230 products as a grid of icons, by category. Tap adds, tap again removes; quantity, a note and the store live on the tile itself. Whatever you create joins your catalogue. The keyboard is the exception, not the way in.

The list follows your feet. Items are not shown in the order you added them but in the order you walk: fruit and vegetables first, then bread, the deli counter, the fridge, the shelves, drinks, home and hygiene - and frozen food last, so it stays frozen.

A cart that closes itself. In the store a tap moves a product to the cart; "Spesa finita" (shopping done) closes the trip, asks where you shopped and saves it to history. If nobody taps it, the cart saves itself overnight. Suggestions learn from how often you buy something and what is in season - long press to see why.

Design system: Playfair Display for titles, Lato for the interface, six token-driven themes - Autumn, Basil, Sea, Plum, Raspberry, Liquorice. Text fields never go below 16px, because iPhone zooms the whole page on anything smaller - and that rule is enforced by a test, not by memory. The voice is the mascot's: a mint fridge called Frigolo, who speaks little, like the app.

From two people to anyone

The private Frigolo had two users and no strangers. Opening it meant designing everything a personal tool never needs:

• Profiles of your own - each person picks a name and a colour; the default avatar is the mascot on that colour, a photo is optional. No real name or photo of ours appears anywhere in the public app.
• Lists, plural - use it alone, or invite up to five people with a link or a code, valid for seven days. When the last person leaves, the list and its data go with them - after a warning.
• Your data, your call - export everything, delete the account in one place, inactive accounts removed after 24 months with notice, privacy policy and terms in plain language.
• Doors closed until it was safe - an audit of the database rules found seventeen issues, two of them serious. Those two were fixed in production the same day, and registrations stayed closed until the blocking ones were too. Since then every release goes through a checklist signed by QA; sign-ups need a confirmed email and a captcha.

A team of AI agents

I didn't build the public Frigolo alone, and not with a team of people either. I ran it with seven AI agents, each with a role, a folder and a notebook to read before every task and update after it: backend and deploy, frontend and landing, data, strategy, copy and community, visuals and video, QA, security and privacy - coordinated by a project-manager agent.

My role was the one that doesn't delegate: deciding, designing, reviewing. The rules were written before the first line of code. Nothing goes public without my yes - not a push, a deploy, an FTP upload, a post or an email. Database changes are tested locally first and reviewed by QA. Every decision lands in a log, with its reason.

In ten days the public repository went from its first commit to 160. What changes is the job: the bottleneck is no longer writing the code, it is knowing what good looks like - and saying no to everything else.

Measure, then change

Frigolo counts without cookies: the landing uses the same cookie-less analytics I built for this site, the app keeps only aggregate counters per day. Two days after sign-ups opened, the numbers said something uncomfortable: only 56% of new users added a single product, and 1 list in 17 was shared.

An empty list is a blank page, and a blank page is where people leave. So the first use was redesigned: the empty list now offers nine everyday products one tap away, the first product gets a small celebration, and only then - once - Frigolo suggests sharing the list. It went live on 20 October. The next reading will say whether it worked; the point is that the question now has a number.

Outcome

A real product, live and public: installable from a link on iPhone and Android, free, no ads, open source under AGPL-3.0, sustained by voluntary "buy me a coffee" donations - and whoever donates gets exactly the same app as whoever doesn't. Around it, everything a launch needs: a landing page, a launch film, a four-week Instagram plan with the posts ready.

The interesting part was not the list. It was designing a whole product as one person, and deciding every day what Frigolo would not do - no prices, no recipes, no push notifications, no promises it can't keep. Design that gets out of the way while you're standing in the aisle.

Try Frigolo ↗  ·  See the landing ↗  ·  Read the code ↗