I Built Software for Families Who Share a Holiday Home (So WhatsApp Stops Running the Place)

beardsleym — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 12:22:37 +0000

Sharing a holiday home with family or friends is great until the admin starts.

Who’s in next weekend?

Did someone already claim Easter?
Who was meant to book the cleaner?
Where’s the WiFi password / insurance cert / “how to winterize the outdoor taps” note?

For most groups this lives in five group chats, a half-maintained Google Calendar, and a Drive folder nobody trusts.

I kept running into that pattern — so I built Shared Holiday Homes:

software for families, friends, and co-owners who already share a place and need less chaos, not another generic calendar.

The problem isn’t “finding a free date”
Generic calendars are fine at showing blocks of time. Shared holiday homes need more than that:

Double-booking protection that isn’t “hope nobody overwrites the event”
Rules for peak weeks, min/max stays, booking windows, and optional approval
Fairness visibility — who actually used the place this year
Named jobs with owners and due dates (cleaning, maintenance, “fix the pump”)
A home for house knowledge — docs, arrival notes, appliance quirks, emergency info
If your group is small and high-trust, Google Calendar can work. Once you’re coordinating multiple households, peak seasons, and maintenance, the “calendar + WhatsApp” stack starts creating the arguments it’s supposed to prevent.

I wrote a longer comparison here if you want the practical breakdown:
Shared Holiday Homes vs Google Calendar

What I built (and what I didn’t)
The product is intentionally narrow. Private co-owner groups don’t need a full property-management system or a fractional-ownership marketplace. They need an operating layer for one shared house.

In scope:

One shared booking calendar
Booking rules / seasonal rotations
Shared task list
Document library
House guides (the handbook people can actually find)

Out of scope on purpose:

Selling property shares
Matching investors
Full bookkeeping / STR channel management

That boundary mattered. Every time I was tempted to add “just one more admin feature,” I asked: does a sibling group fighting over Christmas actually need this?

Light tech note (no architecture dump)
Stack, roughly: React + Vite + TypeScript, Firebase for auth/data/storage/functions, Stripe for subscriptions.

The interesting product problems weren’t the framework choices. They were things like:

roles that make sense for owners/admins/members
rules that feel fair without needing a lawyer
keeping house docs findable without turning into SharePoint
I’m skipping the schema diagrams on purpose. The useful part for most people here is the product constraint: solve coordination for people who already own/share the place.

Try-before-buy without the sales funnel
If you’re not ready for another SaaS login, there are free tools for the common ops problems (rotation planning, cleaning rotas, cost splits, welcome books, etc.):
sharedholidayhomes.com/tools

And if you want the full product:
Start a free trial — 7 days, cancel before it ends and you won’t be charged. Plans are priced by property size (rooms), with unlimited members on every plan.

Who this is for
Families sharing an inherited cottage / beach house / ski place
Friends who bought together
Multi-household groups tired of running the house through chat
If that’s you, I’d love feedback — especially from people who’ve tried to make Google Calendar + Drive “good enough” and hit the wall.

DEV Community: beardsleym

I Built Software for Families Who Share a Holiday Home (So WhatsApp Stops Running the Place)