Daily site diary for small builders
Daily site diary for small builders is a SaaS idea for owners of small building and renovation firms running several jobs at once, priced to test at $29 a month per firm. When a client disputes a delay or an extra, the builder can’t remember what happened that Tuesday. With it, small builders keep a daily site diary on their phone, with photos, workers and delays, ready for any dispute.
. A starting point we wrote, not market research: run the 7-day test before you build.
What problem does it solve?
When a client disputes a delay or an extra, the builder can’t remember what happened that Tuesday. The only record is a camera roll and a few texts.
Why now: Clients expect regular updates on their renovation, and builders already take photos on site every day.
What do they use today?
Most small firms scribble site notes in a pocket notebook or on the back of delivery notes, and send the client an occasional text with a photo. Finding one particular day later means flicking through everything.
How does it work?
Each day a site lead opens the job’s diary on their phone and fills in a quick entry: weather, who was on site, deliveries and delays. Photos are stamped with the date, time and job, and other workers add their own to the same diary. Each week the client gets a summary email with chosen photos, and when a dispute comes up the builder searches past entries by job, date or keyword.
What goes in the first version?
- A quick daily entry: weather, workers, deliveries and delays
- Photos stamped with date, time and job
- Weekly client summary by email, with chosen photos
- Search past entries by job, date or keyword
- Several workers adding to the same job diary
Who pays, and how much?
- Who pays
- Owners of small building and renovation firms running several jobs at once
- Price to test
- $29 a month per firm
A flat price per firm fits builders who run several jobs with a few people, since nothing is charged for each worker or each job. Several workers can add to the same diary without anyone counting seats.
How to test it in 7 days
- 1Ask ten small builders how they’d prove what happened on site last month.
- 2Ask in online builder and renovation groups about their worst dispute over delays.
- 3Have two builders keep a diary in a phone notes app for a week, then review it together.
Where to find the first customers
- Builder and renovation groups on Facebook
- Construction subreddits
- Builders’ merchants and trade counters
What are the risks?
- If an entry takes more than a moment after a long day, builders will stop.
- Construction project suites already include diaries; stay cheaper and simpler for small firms.
How to build it on shipanysaas
4 of the parts it needs are already in the kit, the phone app with the All-in plan. Get the kit, open it in Claude Code, Codex or Cursor, and paste the starting prompt.
- Already in the kit
- Teams and roles
- Billing
- Emails
- Phone app with All-in
- You build
- Daily diary entries with photos
- Weekly client summary emails
- Offline entries that sync later
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; with the All-in plan, the Expo phone app is in apps/native. Help me build the first version of Daily site diary for small builders. 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: Small builders keep a daily site diary on their phone, with photos, workers and delays, ready for any dispute. - Who pays: Owners of small building and renovation firms running several jobs at once - Their problem: When a client disputes a delay or an extra, the builder can’t remember what happened that Tuesday. The only record is a camera roll and a few texts. - Price to test: $29 a month per firm (a plan in apps/web/config/billing.config.ts) ## Build only this first version 1. A quick daily entry: weather, workers, deliveries and delays 2. Photos stamped with date, time and job 3. Weekly client summary by email, with chosen photos 4. Search past entries by job, date or keyword 5. Several workers adding to the same job diary ## 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 - Emails: transactional email through Resend or Nodemailer - Phone app: an iPhone, iPad and Android app on the same backend (All-in plan) ## New code it needs - Daily diary entries with photos - Weekly client summary emails - Offline entries that sync later ## 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. - If apps/native is not in your copy (the Starter plan), build the web app only. 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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