I set out to run markets. I ended up building the software.

I’m a software engineer, and like a lot of engineers I wanted a business of my own on the side. Unattended retail made sense — a vending line, a micro market, a kiosk, a smart cooler are all the same business underneath: real revenue, real inventory, work I could do around a day job. The plan was a route of several markets. I started, like everyone does, with one.

The first thing I wanted after that first placement was a decent way to keep track of it — what each case actually cost me, which slots were carrying the market and which were dead, and when I needed to drive back out. That turned out to be the hard part. The tools I looked at were priced for a fleet I did not have yet, and the ones I could afford were, frankly, not as good as I knew software could be. I was being asked to pay established-operator prices before I had made a single dollar back.

So I changed the plan. Instead of scaling the route, I built the system — with everything I had already learned starting the business myself, and built so it fits any unattended retail unit rather than one kind of hardware. I started building Vendariz in March 2025.

Vendariz exists to take the guesswork out of running a route: where to place products, when a market will run dry, which locations actually earn their keep. Everything it computes is grounded in what you actually did — real restocks, real prices, real miles.

And it starts free, on purpose. The big platforms forget the operators who are just getting started and charge them like the ones who are already established. If you are at the beginning, I would rather partner with you there and grow with you — so the Free plan is a plan you can actually run on rather than a countdown, and the price only moves when your operation does. We do start you with fourteen days of Pro features on top; when they end, the plan is still there.

None of which means Vendariz is a beginner’s tool you outgrow. It is the same platform at three markets and three hundred: routes planned on real driving distance, unlimited team seats on every paid plan, owner/admin/ operator roles with per-market access, realized margin and stockout prediction across the whole fleet, and a per-market price that keeps falling as that fleet grows. If you are already established, you should get the better deal for it — not pay the same rate you did on day one.

It is early, and that is an advantage: feedback from operators lands directly with the person who builds the product. If something in Vendariz should work better for your operation, tell me — the roadmap is built from exactly that.