Own products

MAXBRIX

An ad-free catalogue of LEGO prices in Belarus. It sells nothing, and every price links to the shop that offers it.

Own product · Live at maxbrix.by · Built since May 2026 · Russian and English

What it is

Each set page shows the current price in every shop that stocks the set, and the set's own price history. A Telegram bot keeps watchlists and sends price alerts.

MAXBRIX catalogue of LEGO City sets with prices
MAXBRIX set page on a phone

The decisions behind it

Matching listings that carry no set number

Most classified ads never mention the set number: 70 percent of 2,080 checked. Listings are matched by set number with exact boundaries, so 21282 never matches 212820, and by name only when the name points to one set. When it is ambiguous, the matcher does not guess. Knock-offs, used bundles, single minifigures and incomplete sets are filtered out before any price is counted.

A good price is judged against the set itself

In Belarus almost every set costs more than its US list price: 1,311 of 1,414 priced sets in August 2026. “Below list” would never fire, so the verdict compares today's price with that set's own history. A set with less than 14 days of history gets no verdict at all.

A failure is shown as a failure

When a shop blocks the collector, the block is recorded as a block, so a blocked shop never shows up as out of stock. An unreachable shop never overwrites prices the site already holds. Bot protection is detected, and the collector stops for that run.

Runs at the cost of a side project

Everything scales to zero between runs except the database. Prices are collected twice a day. Set images were re-encoded to WebP at 1,200 pixels, which took them from 1.90 GB to 150 MB.

How it works

  1. Cloud Schedulerstarts the collection twice a day
  2. Collection jobs on Cloud Runread five shops and classifieds, match listings to sets
  3. PostgreSQL on Cloud SQLprices, price history, set data
  4. API on Cloud Runserves the site and the Telegram bot through a notification queue
  5. Firebase HostingReact site with prerendered set pages for search
Stack
Python, FastAPI, SQLAlchemy, Playwright. React 19, TypeScript, Vite. PostgreSQL 16. Cloud Run services and jobs, Cloud Scheduler, Cloud Tasks, Firebase Hosting. Infrastructure in Terraform.
In figures
2,146 sets across 10 themes. 4,336 pages in the sitemap. 1,131 commits since May 2026. Figures as of 27 October 2026.

Back to all work

Building solutions together

Discuss your case or request a proposal

Tell me what is happening and what prompted you to write now. We start with a conversation, and a proposal follows if it makes sense for both of us.

Dzmitry PintusauYou write to me directly.

Enter your name.

Enter an email address I can reply to.

Tell me briefly what prompted you to write.

What would help most

Send opens your email app with the message filled in. Nothing is stored on this site. Privacy notice