// the take
A Rails app for diaper banks and similar essentials charities to track inventory, donations, and distributions to partner organizations. Built by Ruby for Good volunteers and already running 200+ real banks for free, so it's for nonprofits needing inventory software, not for developers looking for a library.
Real production scale behind it — 200+ organizations, millions of recipients tracked, not a toy demo. Inventory operations (donations, purchases, distributions, transfers, adjustments) are modeled as explicit event objects rather than bolted onto CRUD controllers, which keeps the audit trail honest. CI is taken seriously for a volunteer project: parallelized RSpec via Knapsack Pro, Brakeman security scanning, Rubocop, and a working Codespaces/devcontainer setup that gets contributors running fast.
It's a single Rails monolith serving banks, their partner orgs, and admins at once — worth checking how tenant isolation is enforced before trusting it with recipient PII across organizations. There's no API; it's server-rendered with Stimulus controllers, so integrating with a POS, SMS reminders, or any external system means forking the UI rather than calling an endpoint. Contribution flow leans on hacktoberfest/help-wanted churn, which is good for throughput but can mean inconsistent code ownership over time. Self-hosting means running your own Rails+Postgres stack (Cloud66 manifest provided) unless you onboard to their existing hosted instance instead.
We read the README, the directory tree and a key source file in October 2026. Nobody pays to be listed. How we judge →