Claimly.com - Millions in Forgotten Cash. One Map to Find It

Inspiration

There’s over $58B in unclaimed property nationwide, and California holds more than 3 million of those records, each worth $500 or more. Most people never claim it because the official system is clunky, slow, and doesn’t show what’s around you.

In Czechia, we built something similar (www.ceskazeme.cz) — turning a raw government spreadsheet into a map that helped prevent millions in land from being expropriated. That inspired us to build Claimly: a clean, map-first app that helps you find not just your own unclaimed money, but also your neighbors’, your aunt’s, or your friend’s.

What it does

Claimly is a civic-tech tool that makes it easy to search and discover unclaimed property in California. It: Turns 3.2M+ public records from the California State Controller’s Office into a searchable interactive map

Allows users to zoom into any city or street to see nearby unclaimed funds. Helps users search by name, location, or both. Lets people share findings with relatives, neighbors, or friends. Offers legally compliant claim assistance (under CA §1582) if desired. It’s not just about helping yourself value for your whole community.

How we built it

Frontend: Built in 5 days using Bolt.new — allowed us to move fast and focus on flow
Backend: Supabase handles our 3.2M+ dataset and search logic
Full-text search
PostGIS for geographic queries
Materialized views for performance
Edge & DB functions for logic + speed
Geocoding: California’s data didn’t include coordinates. We enriched it using the U.S. Census Geocoder. About 20% of addresses failed due to typos or wrong fields we queued them for fallback.

Data came from the California State Controller’s Office: https://www.sco.ca.gov/upd.html

Challenges we ran into

3M+ Rows: Loading and querying that much data was tricky, especially in early stages.
Geocoding Failures: About 20% of addresses couldn’t be mapped — misspelled cities, wrong states, even countries.
Clustering: Still a challenge. Urban areas like LA and SF were overloaded with pins — we’re still tuning this.
Data Quality: Some entries were completely wrong. We flag them for manual review.
Pagination + Loading: Small errors here could break the app. We had to fine-tune loading behavior.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Built a fully working product in 5 days
Solved mapping and geocoding at scale
Created a tool that helps people discover unexpected value for themselves — and others

What we learned

That we will fire desinger :D Not really, it is amazig what kind of visual quality it is possibe to get out og the tool, also the we will intergrat the bolt flow to our company ruitine, producmt managers, oprerative everyone will boltung@