DutyZero

Who it's for

Indie e-commerce sellers (Shopify/Etsy/Amazon FBM, ~$10k–$500k/yr) shipping cross-border between Canada and the US; today they cope with carrier checkout duty calculators, $100–150-per-shipment customs brokers, or just eating refused parcels and 'duty due on delivery' refund demands.

The problem

Payment: the new dollar-for-dollar retaliatory rounds mean 25%+ surprise duties per order, refused deliveries, and chargebacks; a single broker filing to fix classification costs $100+. Misclassification also risks CBSA/CBP penalties, but the daily bleed is cash.

How to build it

CSV/Shopify import → SKU table with HS code + confidence; duty engine fed by weekly-scraped USITC HTS and CBSA schedules plus the current surtax orders; one-click blanket CUSMA certification-of-origin PDF (12-month period, origin criterion cited); daily Federal Register / Canada Gazette watcher with email alert within 24h when an action touches your HS chapters.

How it makes money

$29/mo per store for the watcher plus unlimited certificates: one avoided broker filing ($100+) or one refused-parcel loss pays for a quarter, and free tools (Canada Tariff Finder, HTS search) return a rate but don't watch your SKU list, track weekly surtax changes, or fill the blanket certificate for you.

Why it doesn't exist yet

Incumbents skip it: brokers bill per filing and have zero incentive to hand you a $0-duty self-declared certificate generator, and landed-cost vendors (Zonos, Avalara) sell duty *calculation* priced for enterprises, not duty *elimination* for a 3-person Etsy shop. The indie gap: CUSMA certification is a self-declared document needing no broker, and the retaliatory measures now change weekly — faster than enterprise vendors update SKU-level guidance.

First users

r/Etsy, Shopify Community, and Canadian maker forums are full this week of 'my customer just got a $40 duty bill' threads with a dated, acute pain; a free 'paste 10 SKUs, see this week's real duty' web checker converts them, and the certificate upsell is obvious the moment one SKU shows 25% → $0.

Build size

2 people x 8 weeks. Included: classification assist over the ~500 HS subheadings covering common e-commerce goods, duty engine for the Canada↔US lane incl. current surtaxes, CUSMA blanket-certificate PDF generator, daily gazette watcher with alerts, Shopify/CSV import. Excluded: other trade lanes, customs brokerage/bond filing, duty drawback, legal advice.

Biggest risk

Kill event: a Canada-US deal gets signed before the judge date and the retaliatory tariffs are lifted, collapsing the panic demand — mitigated by the scheduled 2026 CUSMA joint review keeping classification and origin-certificate demand alive even under a deal.

Conditions for a hit (all 3 required)

• Given a CSV of 100 product SKUs, returns per-row HS codes with confidence scores and the current total duty per SKU including the latest retaliatory surtaxes, in under 5 minutes
• For every SKU meeting CUSMA origin rules, produces a filled 12-month blanket certification-of-origin PDF with the specific origin criterion cited, in one click
• Polls Federal Register and Canada Gazette daily and emails the seller within 24 hours when a published tariff action changes the duty on any of their watched HS subheadings

How it's judged (in 6 months)

Product Hunt daily top 5, or a Show HN thread with ≥150 points, or ≥1,000 GitHub stars by the judge date(judgment date 2027-02-23)

AI self-confidence 50/100 — self-reported likelihood of meeting the criterion, not a business success rate