For those still mourning the loss of dot-com luxuries like Urbanfetch.com andKosmo.com, be of good cheer. FinderGuy.com is about to make your life a lot easier.

FinderGuy won’t deliver hot chocolate and a new Sony walkman to your door in the midst of a blizzard, like Urbanfetch. But we all knew that was too good to be true.

Instead, FinderGuy will tell you where these items, and thousands of others, are available, by location, price range, and manufacturer. For free! No, really, for free – and that may be a business model problem, but it’s a great sales tool.

Carolyn Meyer launched Finder-Guy.com in September 2002, after spending more than six months walking the streets of Manhattan with her partner Lisa Parrish. The inspiration behind the undertaking? An aversion to shopping, which led her to spend those months, and many more, um, shopping.

Ms. Meyer considers her antipathy to spending time scouting out stores, one shared by many busy New Yorkers, and has built her business to accommodate these consumers. Her personal quest for a nearby source of Cosabella underwear (she had been trekking to Bergdorf’s for these favorite items) revealed the shop across the street from her West Village digs. What a huge time-saver!

The original business plan for FinderGuy offered to find any item a shopper e-mailed in, anywhere in the city, for no charge, which is still the case today. Real people do the research – this is not a search engine – and email you back the results, usually within one or two days.

For revenues, the company asked the boutiques listed on the site to pay a subscription fee. This was a miscalculation.

Particularly in the post-September 11 world, small shops across New York were hard hit by the economic downturn and unwilling to finance the online search firm. In fact, one of the selling points to Ms. Meyer when first putting together the proposed business was that so many boutiques were nearly empty during the day. They seemed to need help.

Figuring that one of the attractions of New York was the very existence of hundreds of small, unusual stores, Ms. Meyer imagined that publicizing these outfits would constitute something of a welcome public service.

After all, would New York be as appealing if all the boutiques were rolled up into one giant Wal-Mart? The problem was – who would pay to prevent such a community disaster? It turned out not to be the boutiques most at risk, because they couldn’t afford it.

Last fall, the company revised their business plan, and is now counting on the sale of discount cards to finance their operation. The idea is this: for $40 a year, the cardholder receives a discount of 10% at boutiques which have signed up. There’s no fee paid by the store; they simply have to provide the discount.

It’s a pretty good deal if you’re a frequent customer of a store on the list. But, of course, that’s not the idea. The concept is that shoppers will cross territorial boundaries to frequent new neighborhoods and new stores.

So far, almost 450 stores across Manhattan have signed on, which has al lowed FinderGuy to operate modestly in the black. The more stores that honor the discount card, of course, the easier it will be to sign up new holders.

The company has also developed new revenue opportunities on its Web site. Boutiques can pay to have their listing highlighted, and consequently more visible, or pay to be further singled out as “Unique Boutique of the Week,” which features a shop’s goods in a short write-up provided by the FinderGuy folks.

FinderGuy has more than 15,000 subscribers and new people logging onto the Web site daily. It has several finders who track down the objects sought, and they are very good. Though they will no longer spend days tracking down such items as “the blue blouse worn by Jennifer Anniston on the 16th episode of “Friends” (seriously), they are game for nearly anything else. Over time, they have scoped out sources that can reliably produce some hard-to-find items, such as rare old movies, so the burden has eased.

Still, they are occasionally defeated. In this case, they issue a “Stumped” report to the seeker, complete with a rundown of all measures taken to complete the request.

One wishes Ms. Meyer and Ms. Parrish well. They are both attractive, energetic, bright graduates of Duke University, and they are working hard to convert their concept into a viable business.

The service is terrific, and the boost to local shops indeed welcome. The only drawback is that New Yorkers need few extra reasons to sit at their desks. For many, shopping is their only exercise. Maybe that’s why Tasti DLite, a dieters’ reward, is highlighted on the FinderGuy web site.