This is a submission for the Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge: Week 2 (theme: Side Hustle).
What I Built
Dukaan Helper is a small web app for local shopkeepers. They type product details the way they actually talk, for example:
cotton ki kurti, size M L XL, rang neela aur laal, price 450, free delivery Delhi mein
and get a clean, ready-to-send WhatsApp catalog message, online listing, or Instagram caption in English, Hindi or Hinglish. One click copies it, ready to paste into WhatsApp.
Who Would Pay for It
Small sellers who sell on WhatsApp and Instagram. They know their products well but find it hard to write polished English listings, and many pay a freelancer or simply skip writing good descriptions.
My idea for pricing is ā¹99 per month, with a free tier of 10 listings a month. That is roughly one extra sale a month for the seller. I picked this number by reasoning about small-seller margins. I have since asked two shopkeepers (see "First User" below), which is too small a sample to prove anything.
Demo
- Live page: https://saurabhh-cloud.github.io/dukaan-helper/ (needs Ollama running on your computer to generate text)
- Code: https://github.com/saurabhh-cloud/dukaan-helper
How I Built It
- Frontend: plain HTML, CSS and JavaScript. I'm a first-year B.Sc. Mathematics student learning web development, so I kept it simple on purpose.
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AI: Google's open-weight Gemma (
gemma3:1b) running locally through Ollama. - How it works: the page sends one prompt to Ollama's local API. The prompt tells the model to use only the facts given (no invented prices, sizes or colours), keep the message short, and end by asking the buyer to message to order.
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Settings: the model name and server address can be changed in the page, so a bigger model (like
gemma3:4b) can be swapped in without touching the code.
Why Open Innovation Matters Here
- Cost: a shop with 50 products would pay per call to a closed API. Running Gemma locally costs nothing per listing, which is what makes a ā¹99 plan workable at all.
- Privacy: product costs, supplier details and customer information stay on the shopkeeper's own laptop and are never sent to a server they don't control.
- Control: I can swap Gemma 1B for 4B, or change the prompt, without waiting for anyone's pricing or policy changes.
Local inference also helped with what my first user cared about most, speed: there is no network round trip to a remote server, and the result came back quickly on my laptop.
Where it falls short: gemma3:1b is a very small model. Small models are generally weaker at Hindi and Hinglish than larger ones, so a real deployment should use a bigger model such as gemma3:4b, which needs a more powerful computer. The page also needs Ollama installed locally, which is a barrier for non-technical shopkeepers.
First User
I showed Dukaan Helper to a shopkeeper near my house. His feedback, in short:
- He said it is good.
- What he mentioned most was the speed: it gives the result quickly.
- He is not comfortable writing in English, so the Hindi output is what helps him most.
When I asked about price, he said ā¹99/month is fine and that he would pay for it.
I also asked a second shopkeeper, who did not give a clear answer on price. So I have one yes and one "not sure", which is a very small sample. I'm treating this as an early signal and not as proof that the ā¹99/month price works. The feedback does support my choice of Hindi and Hinglish support, which I'll keep as the main feature.
Prize Categories
Best Use of Gemma
Top comments (2)
Submitted my entry: Dukaan Helper, which turns Hindi/Hinglish product details into WhatsApp catalog messages for small shopkeepers. It runs Gemma locally with Ollama, so there is no API cost and shop data stays on the laptop. Tested with a local shopkeeper, who liked the speed and the Hindi output.
Post: dev.to/saurabh_0001/dukaan-helper-...
Demo: youtu.be/z2bZOzyWtwU
Would love feedback! š
Thanks for reading! A few notes on how this came together:
If you run a small shop or know someone who does, what feature would you want next? I'd love your feedback. š