Weekly capacity planner for small agencies
Weekly capacity planner for small agencies is a SaaS idea for owners and operations leads of agencies with five to forty people, priced to test at $6 per person a month. Who is free next month lives in the owner’s head or a colour-coded spreadsheet. With it, agency owners see who is booked on which client for the coming weeks, so they know if they can take new work.
. A starting point we wrote, not market research: run the 7-day test before you build.
What problem does it solve?
Who is free next month lives in the owner’s head or a colour-coded spreadsheet. The agency says yes to a new client, then finds the designer is already booked twice over.
Why now: Agencies now mix staff with freelancers, so who is free changes every week and is hard to track by memory.
What do they use today?
Most agencies plan with a shared spreadsheet, a whiteboard or a talk with team leads. Freelancer availability sits in message threads, and deals not yet signed live in a separate list.
How does it work?
A prospect asks to start next month, so the owner opens the week view to see who is free. People who are over or under booked stand out, and anyone on time off is blocked for that week automatically. The owner pencils the new client in as a tentative booking in half-day blocks, then makes it firm when the deal is signed.
What goes in the first version?
- People and freelancers with weekly hours available
- Book people onto clients in half-day blocks
- Week view showing who is over or under booked
- Tentative bookings for deals not yet signed
- Time off that blocks a person’s week automatically
Who pays, and how much?
- Who pays
- Owners and operations leads of agencies with five to forty people
- Price to test
- $6 per person a month
A price per person follows the number of people being planned, so it grows only as the agency does. It replaces the planning spreadsheet that someone has to update by hand.
How to test it in 7 days
- 1Ask ten agency owners how they decided whether to take their last new client.
- 2Rebuild one agency’s planning spreadsheet as a clickable mock-up and watch them use it.
- 3Read reviews of resource planning tools and list complaints from small agencies.
Where to find the first customers
- Agency owner communities on LinkedIn and Slack
- Agency and freelancing subreddits
- Consultants and coaches who advise agency owners
What are the risks?
- Project management tools add capacity views, so stay focused on simple weekly planning.
- Plans go stale unless someone updates them; send a weekly nudge.
How to build it on shipanysaas
5 of the parts it needs are already in the kit. Get the kit, open it in Claude Code, Codex or Cursor, and paste the starting prompt.
- Already in the kit
- Teams and roles
- Billing
- Admin panel
- Emails
- In-app notifications
- You build
- Weekly booking grid by person and client
- Over and under booking warnings
- Tentative bookings and time off
See the starting prompt
You are in a fresh copy of the shipanysaas starter kit, a pnpm and Turborepo monorepo: the Next.js web app is in apps/web and the Supabase database, with its migrations, in apps/web/supabase. Help me build the first version of Weekly capacity planner for small agencies. Read AGENTS.md first, then the AGENTS.md in every folder you work in: the kit's rules there win over your defaults. When a skill in .agents/skills (also in .claude/skills and .cursor/skills) matches a task, use it. ## The product - What it does: Agency owners see who is booked on which client for the coming weeks, so they know if they can take new work. - Who pays: Owners and operations leads of agencies with five to forty people - Their problem: Who is free next month lives in the owner’s head or a colour-coded spreadsheet. The agency says yes to a new client, then finds the designer is already booked twice over. - Price to test: $6 per person a month (a plan in apps/web/config/billing.config.ts) ## Build only this first version 1. People and freelancers with weekly hours available 2. Book people onto clients in half-day blocks 3. Week view showing who is over or under booked 4. Tentative bookings for deals not yet signed 5. Time off that blocks a person’s week automatically ## Already in the kit: reuse it, never rebuild it - Teams and roles: team accounts with members, roles and invitations - Billing: Stripe or Lemon Squeezy subscriptions, per seat or usage-based, and one-off payments - Admin panel: a super-admin panel that needs two-step sign-in - Emails: transactional email through Resend or Nodemailer - In-app notifications: a notifications bell in the web app ## New code it needs - Weekly booking grid by person and client - Over and under booking warnings - Tentative bookings and time off ## How to work 1. Plan first: list the database tables (with row-level security, so each team only sees its own rows), the pages and the server actions for the first feature. Then stop and wait for my OK. 2. Build one feature at a time with the kit's own UI and form components, with a migration for every schema change and user-facing text in the translation files. 3. After each feature, run the verification steps in AGENTS.md, fix what they find, and tell me what you built and what comes next. ## Rules - Ask me before you add a dependency, delete a file, or change sign-in, billing or the admin panel. - Leave the parts of the kit this product doesn't use as they are. Done when every first-version feature works for a signed-in team and the AGENTS.md checks pass.
Guides for the parts it uses
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