A pipeline of applied, interviewing, offer, and rejected, with notes and follow-up reminders per company, is genuinely simple CRUD — one of the more approachable builds in this library, and something people already improvise in a spreadsheet or Airtable.
Build it
Effort: an eveningRunning cost: $0/mo to start
Why CanICodeThis says Build it
Companies and roles moving through a fixed pipeline (applied, screening, interview, offer, rejected) is a straightforward status-field data model
Notes, contact names, and dates per application are ordinary CRUD
An email reminder to follow up if an application has sat untouched for N days is one transactional-email call on a schedule
The parts that'll cause problems
Auto-importing applications from your inbox (parsing confirmation emails) needs a real email-parsing integration, a genuinely fragile, ongoing maintenance surface
Salary and offer comparison across multiple simultaneous offers is a real, separate feature beyond simple pipeline tracking
Browser-extension one-click saving while browsing a job posting is a different, separate piece of platform work from the tracker itself
How I'd build this
frontend
Next.js
database
Supabase
auth
Supabase Auth
hosting
Vercel
MVP scope
Applications with company, role, and a fixed pipeline status
Notes and contact details per application
Email reminder if an application hasn't been updated in N days
Postpone to v2
Auto-import from inbox confirmation emails
Multi-offer salary comparison
A browser extension for one-click saving from a job posting
What it actually costs to build
AI agent — with a subscription (Claude Pro/Max, Cursor, etc.)
$0 marginal
AI agent — pay-per-use API, no subscription
$16–$27 one-time
Hosting, once it's running
$0/mo (free tier)
Domain name, if you want your own
~$12/yr
Existing tools solving a similar problem typically run $5–$24/mo — see how they compare below.
The build prompt
Build me a job application tracker: applications with company, role, and a status moving through a fixed pipeline (applied, screening, interview, offer, rejected), with notes and contact details per application. An email reminder if an application hasn't been touched in a set number of days. SQLite or Supabase behind a small API, single-user login. Skip inbox auto-import for v1 — manual entry is fine to start.
