Hello Cargobikers,

Long time no see. I've been quieter on the public side of OpenCargo lately –
which doesn't mean nothing's been happening. Quite the opposite. Quick update.

The website's slowly ramping up. Last three months on Google:

• OpenCargo showed up in Google search ~13,000 times → ~635 click-throughs

• Impressions up roughly 8× since spring, and it's climbed to page 1

• People find makers by name — "rad3 box", "larry vs harry honeycomb board", "studio vollebak urban arrow" — and click straight through to the maker

• Product pages now show up as rich results in Google

• Visitors from 14+ countries – Germany, the US, Denmark, the Netherlands and France leading

The catalogue's at 42 makers, 319 products, 11 countries, and still growing.

And then there's the rabbit hole. Building this got me thinking about how much
of it I'd quietly handed to big tech — Notion, Supabase, Vercel, the lot; for a
project that makes no money. So I've started pulling it back: OpenCargo now runs, in
large part, on a small server in my flat. More independent, cheaper, and the data's mine.

I wrote the whole story up : why a cargo bike and a home server are, weirdly, the
same instinct: The same reason I ride a cargo bike, I built my own server →

And one thing I built on it is actually cargo-bike-related: a little calm-route
planner I made for my mum — it finds the quiet, low-stress way across town instead
of the fastest. I open-sourced it, so you can run your own:
github.com/vincebullittcph/cph-safe-bike

On another note — this weekend was the Svajerløb in Copenhagen, the cargo bike
community out racing. And in 10 days I'm off to Italy for the Biga Race. Both highly
recommended.

Cheers, and thanks for cargo biking.

— Vince