Building Reelic: The Solo Journey
Reelic is built, designed, and maintained entirely by Deepak as a solo project. It started as a personal tool to solve his own frustration with searching saved Instagram reels and is now available in open beta for everyone.
The Story Behind Reelic
Like many Instagram users, I save a lot of reels (recipes I want to cook, workout routines, travel spots, and funny clips). But as my saved library grew, it became impossible to find anything. Instagram's interface only offers an endless scrolling grid sorted strictly by date, with no search bar or indexing capabilities.
Frustrated by scrolling for minutes just to find a pasta recipe from a few weeks prior, I opened DevTools one evening. I realized all my saved reel metadata was already loaded in the DOM. I wrote a quick script to index them locally in the browser, and the first prototype of Reelic was born.
Building as a Solo Creator
Building a Chrome extension, a sidepanel dashboard, and a landing page solo requires keeping things simple and local-first. I wanted to design a tool that is lightning-fast, uses zero database servers, and respects privacy absolutely. By writing Reelic as a client-side database (using IndexedDB and Chrome's local storage), the extension is not only incredibly secure but also highly performant.
Every feature, from fuzzy searching captions and hashtags to generating your 'Insta Wrap' curator metrics, runs entirely inside your browser. No external API keys, no servers, and zero trackable telemetry.
What's Next for Reelic?
We are currently in open beta, gathering feedback from developers and curators alike. The roadmap includes supporting saved posts/images, exporting collections, and improving OCR searching within the video frames themselves.
If you have ideas, feedback, or just want to connect, feel free to reach out via my LinkedIn. I read every message and would love to hear how you use Reelic to manage your library.
