I moved to a new neighborhood in San Diego and couldn't figure out my trash pickup day. I asked ChatGPT. It confidently told me Tuesday. It was wrong. Asked Claude. Also wrong. Googled it — the city's lookup tool is a Salesforce app behind reCAPTCHA that barely works on mobile.

So I built trashalert.io — a free, community-powered trash schedule lookup covering San Diego and Austin (954K+ addresses across 79+ neighborhoods).

How it works: - Type your address → get your collection day (trash + recycling + organics) - Holiday-adjusted dates — SD shifts pickup forward after holidays - Recycling week A/B tracker — the most confusing thing about SD trash - Interactive collection day map — 954K+ addresses color-coded by pickup day - Calendar export (.ics) — set it and forget it - Community reports — neighbors confirm each other's schedules

Tech: Next.js 15, Supabase (Postgres, 954K+ records), Vercel (102kB first load), Plausible + GA4. No auth, no accounts — zero friction.

The data problem: San Diego has 500K+ households. The city's data is locked behind reCAPTCHA Enterprise on a Salesforce endpoint. My approach: build the database from the community up. Users report their pickup day → consensus verification (3+ confirmations = verified). Started with 201 addresses, expanded to 954K+ via hauler data imports across 79+ neighborhoods in 2 cities.

What I learned: 1. Address normalization is surprisingly hard (Ave vs Avenue vs Av, apartment stripping, ordinal conversion) 2. Every municipality structures trash data differently — there's no standard 3. People WANT to report their trash day. The "help your neighbors" angle converts better than any growth hack. 4. AI confidently hallucinates municipal data. This is a real gap.

Free, no ads, community-powered. Would love feedback. Planning to expand to more cities.