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Project overview

Open Consumables is a measurement archive for everyday hardware. The output is a small set of dated, measured baselines for the mechanical interfaces buyers care about, published so anyone can keep buying, printing, or batch-producing to fit.

What we do

  • Measure: pick a consumable category with an undocumented de facto compatibility standard, take real measurements with disclosed methodology.
  • Publish: release dated baselines as plain markdown, CAD where useful, and reference data buyers and aftermarket producers can verify.
  • Freeze: a baseline is a snapshot, not a moving target. New baseline, new date.

What we don't do

  • Manufacture or certify: we describe what already exists in the wild.
  • Curate or pick winners: we don't decide which brand is the "right" one.
  • Steward standards: we publish baselines, not ongoing governance regimes.
  • Build network-effect platforms: substitutability of supply is the goal, not lock-in to our spec.

Categories we work on

A category only qualifies if all three are true:

  1. The spec is complete. Geometry, material, mechanical interface, measurable performance capture what buyers care about. If value lives in fit, taste, feel, or fashion, it's out of scope.
  2. The buyer has opted out of choice. Either institutionally (procurement, hospitals) or self-imposed (rebuy what worked last time).
  3. Rebuyability beats novelty. The buyer wants the same thing in ten years more than they want a new version this year.

Pass: toothbrush heads, air filters, water filters, vacuum consumables, fasteners, generic OTC consumables, hospital consumables.

Fail: pants, cosmetics, food, fashion, anything where the value is the act of choosing.

How adoption is supposed to work

Three plausible adoption mechanics, in order of how much weight they carry near-term:

  1. Rebuyability (consumer wedge): buyers who've already chosen what they want and want to buy the same thing in five and ten years.
  2. Convergence (manufacturer + aftermarket wedge): aftermarket vocabulary already exists for many Chinese-IoT brands. We formalize and measure what's already in active use.
  3. Procurement (institutional wedge): buyers who write specs into RFPs. Already how hospital consumables work. Phase 4+ question.

We bet on (1) and (2) during R&D. We do not assume USB-C-style network-effect adoption.

Status

Pre-product. The pilot category is electric toothbrush heads. Most categories are scaffolded but not yet active. See Categories for current work.