I was tired of reading user manuals… so I built a micro-SaaS around it

Midgard — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 13:48:58 +0000

I'm just starting my journey with SaaS projects. Recently I came up with a simple idea. Let's say you buy a new oven. And that oven has a digital clock, oh wow! But the time displayed isn't right… You search the manual for the information on how to change the time. You pass a couple of minutes going through languages you don't speak, tech jargon that doesn't matter in your case and, what's worse, everything is written in small, unreadable font.

Here comes Manualist! You upload:

Pictures of your manual
Official PDF file related to the product
Or plain text from the manufacturer’s website

And the service handles the rest. Website extracts the content (Tesseract OCR for pictures, unpdf JS library for PDF), analyzes it with AI (Mistral AI for now, OpenRouter models as fallback) and gives you these things:

Quick Summary: Check out what's inside the manual, shortened so you don't have to waste time on checking all the pages.
Table of Contents: For even faster check-in, all the summary’s sections listed with shortened descriptions and references.
To-Do List: Helpful list of things to do after purchase or while using the product you're analysing.
Chat Dock: Talk with AI about your manual, with full markdown support.

Now I'm stuck in the beta version. When I first thought of Manualist I considered it as fully AI-driven assistant but now I have more ideas for features that would be more useful than just AI. When creating an account, you get 10 credits for free. You use 1 credit for every manual analysis and 1 credit per message in the Chat Dock.

My goal is to create a hub for user’s devices - you can track their warranty and note all the failures and repairs.

You can check out the project repository here.
You can check out the live beta version here.

I encourage you to join my Discord server if you're interested in sharing any reviews or helping shape the future of Manualist!
https://discord.gg/cnXFReJNRZ

DEV Community: Midgard

I was tired of reading user manuals… so I built a micro-SaaS around it