indexAll - indexes of brands, apps, and tools

A side project born from the urge to rabbit-hole into passion areas and find brands you didn't know existed. Started in 2020, now AI-accelerated.

indexAll

indexall.io is a directory of brands, apps, and tools organized by passion and use case. Guitar gear, coffee equipment, 3D printing, note-taking apps, watches, archery, vaping, sailing - 356 indexes across 32 categories.

Hobbie project started in 2020.

Why

I'm the kind of person who, when getting into a new hobby, needs to map out the entire landscape of brands before buying anything. Not just the top 5 results from Google - all of them. The mainstream ones, the niche ones, the Japanese specialist nobody talks about outside Reddit, the 150-year-old family business still making things by hand.

I want to answer questions like: what's the oldest French watch brand? Which espresso machine makers are Italian vs. Swiss? How many skateboard deck brands exist? What are my options for a Korean-made fountain pen?

Every passion area has this hidden layer of brands that most people never discover. The popular ones float to the top of every listicle. But the interesting stuff - the small makers, the regional specialists, the heritage brands - takes real digging. IndexAll is the result of that digging, structured so you can filter, sort, and browse by country, founding year, and product type.

Two sections: Brands (271 indexes across 20 categories - Automotive, Sports, EDC, Clothes, Kitchen, and more) and Apps (85 indexes across 12 categories - AI, Creative, Development, Productivity, and more).

The numbers

  • 19,735 items (brands, apps, tools)
  • 356 browsable indexes
  • 3,858 items cross-listed in multiple indexes
  • 89 countries represented
  • 4,699 tags for filtering by product type

Largest indexes: Guitar (932), Skateboarding (792), E-Bikes (698), Desks (397), Watches (349).

The story

I started this as a hobby project in 2020. The original idea was simple - I kept bookmarking brands in spreadsheets across a dozen passion areas and thought: why not make this browsable?

What followed was a long stretch of manual research, Python scripts, and more time (and money) than I'd like to admit for what remained a very basic site. I'd spend hours on a single category - Googling, reading forums, checking brand websites, verifying country of origin, looking up founding years. Then writing import scripts, debugging edge cases, fixing encoding issues. The usual side-project cycle of bursts of energy followed by months of neglect.

By early 2025, I had about 50 categories with roughly 4,000 brands. Functional, but nowhere near the coverage I wanted.

Then AI changed the equation.

Using Claude Code, I rebuilt the data pipeline and expanded the catalog from 4,000 to nearly 20,000 items across 356 indexes. What used to take me a weekend per category - the research, verification, deduplication, cross-linking - now runs as an automated workflow. An AI agent researches a category using Perplexity's search API, cross-references against the existing database for items that belong in multiple indexes, filters false positives, verifies data quality, and imports the results. I run 14 of these agents in parallel, each working on a different index.

The full catalog update across all 356 indexes took a few hours. The same work would have taken me months of weekends.

AI didn't replace the curation decisions - what belongs in an index, how to tag it, which brands are real vs. defunct vs. irrelevant. But it eliminated the grunt work that made the project stall. The research, the data entry, the deduplication, the cross-referencing.

How it works

It's a static site generated from a local SQLite database. A Python script reads the database, renders HTML pages through templates, and outputs a folder of static files. No server, no CMS, no framework. One CSS file, vanilla JavaScript for sorting and filtering, and that's it.

Each index page shows a sortable, filterable table with name, country of origin, founding year, website, social links, and tags. Tags create sub-pages - /hi-fi/headphones/ shows only headphone brands within the Hi-Fi index. The homepage shows a grid of all indexes grouped by category with a real-time search filter.

Items can appear in multiple indexes with different tags in each. Sennheiser shows up in Hi-Fi, Home Studio, and Podcasting. A knife brand might be in both Knives and EDC. The database tracks 3,858 items that cross multiple categories.

Design

Minimal, clean. Light theme only. Frosted-glass header, tag filter pills, sortable tables.

What's next

  • Individual item pages with full details.
  • Better search across all indexes.
  • Logo/favicon fetching.
  • Maybe user submissions via pull requests.