How one student curbed panic buying with the Pack

A student-built calculator for the great toilet paper shortage

Ben Sassoon, a final-year computer science student at the University of Birmingham, watched the early days of the pandemic with the same concern as everyone else—except that he noticed the emptiest shelves were the ones where toilet paper used to sit. Rather than shrug, he built a small web tool to help people measure exactly what they had, and the project quickly became a global reference point for an otherwise anxious moment.

The result is How Much Toilet Paper, which takes two simple inputs: how many rolls a user has and how often they use the bathroom. It then computes how long that supply will last under quarantine conditions. No accounts, no data pipelines, nothing more complicated than the math most people could do themselves—but doing it in public, with a friendly interface, makes the point stick.

Built in under an hour

The idea started as a joke between Sassoon and his friend Sam Harris about their own consumption patterns. Sassoon then turned it into a working site with the Student Developer Pack, using GitHub Pages for hosting, Icons8 and Iconscout for graphic assets, and Weglot for localization support. The entire tool came together in less than 60 minutes.

The timing could not have been better. Within one day, the site drew 500 users; that number doubled the following day. Five days later, it had crossed a million users worldwide, and it now reports more than three million total visits. Sassoon's stated aim is not to mock anyone but to reduce panic buying: "The average user has 500% more toilet paper than they need," he said, adding that stopping even one person from hoarding frees up supplies for those who actually need them.

From university project to global public tool

Mainstream media coverage quickly followed, and How Much Toilet Paper was featured by outlets like CNN, The Verge, and late-night shows including The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon and The Daily Show with Trevor Noah. Traffic of that scale is a long way from a class project, yet the technology behind it is deliberately modest, demonstrating that reach is not always a function of complexity.

Sassoon is clear about what he wants other students to take from his experience: there are many reasons to stall on an idea, but equally many to try it. "I'm just a student, but it doesn't matter who you are," he said. "Everyone has a chance with the tools that are available now."