Building Reelic: The Story behind the Solo Project
Reelic is built, designed, and maintained entirely by Deepak as a solo project. It started as a personal tool to search saved Instagram reels and is now available as a secure browser extension for curators everywhere.
The story behind Reelic
Like many visual curators, I save dozens of reels weekly: recipes, workouts, home designs, and creative references. As my collection grew, finding specific clips became a headache. Instagram's list is locked in a strict date order with no search utility.
Tired of scrolling for minutes just to retrieve a pasta recipe, I looked under the hood using browser DevTools. I discovered the text metadata for saved reels is loaded directly in the page. I wrote a quick script to index them, and the prototype for Reelic was born.
Developing solo
Developing a Chrome extension and custom dashboard solo requires keeping logic simple and local-first. I wanted a tool that is fast and respects privacy, so the library itself lives in a client-side database (IndexedDB) and only a small leaderboard backend runs on a server.
Search, text indexing, and your curator 'Insta Wrap' all run locally in your browser. The extension has no tracking cookies, ads, or analytics scripts.
Roadmap
We are currently in open beta and active development. The roadmap includes supporting saved images and posts, exporting collections to spreadsheet files, and improving search within video transcripts.
Have ideas or feedback? Connect with me on LinkedIn. I read every message and would love to hear how you organize your library.
