Shift swaps for small hourly teams
Shift swaps for small hourly teams is a SaaS idea for managers of cafés, shops and clinics with 10 to 50 hourly staff, priced to test at $3 per staff member a month. Swaps happen in group chats, the manager approves in a hurry, and the schedule on the wall stays wrong. With it, staff post shifts they can’t work, colleagues pick them up, and the manager approves with one tap.
. A starting point we wrote, not market research: run the 7-day test before you build.
What problem does it solve?
Swaps happen in group chats, the manager approves in a hurry, and the schedule on the wall stays wrong. No-shows follow, and payroll doesn’t match who actually worked.
Why now: Hourly staff expect to sort their schedules from their phones, and a small team doesn’t need a full workforce suite.
What do they use today?
Staff ask around in a group chat or the break room until someone says yes, then tell the manager. The printed schedule is rarely corrected, so payroll relies on what people remember.
How does it work?
The manager imports the week’s schedule or types it in, and staff see their shifts on their phones. A barista who cannot work a shift posts it for swap from their phone, and a colleague claims it. The manager approves with one tap, everyone affected gets an email, and the record shows who really worked each shift.
What goes in the first version?
- The week’s schedule, imported or typed in
- Post a shift for swap from the phone
- A colleague claims it and the manager approves
- A clean record of who worked which shift
- An email to everyone affected
Who pays, and how much?
- Who pays
- Managers of cafés, shops and clinics with 10 to 50 hourly staff
- Price to test
- $3 per staff member a month
Pricing per staff member suits a café or clinic where the headcount is easy to see, so the bill moves only when someone joins or leaves. It replaces the group chat used for swaps today.
How to test it in 7 days
- 1Ask five café or shop managers how swaps work today.
- 2Read r/smallbusiness for scheduling headaches.
- 3Run one team’s swaps by hand in a shared sheet for two weeks.
Where to find the first customers
- r/smallbusiness
- Local hospitality and retail associations
- Bookkeepers who run payroll for small shops
What are the risks?
- Scheduling apps often include swaps, so this must be simpler and cheaper.
- Staff expect phone alerts, and push isn’t in the kit, so you would add it.
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
- Schedule import and editing
- Swap requests and approvals
- Push notifications for new swaps
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 Shift swaps for small hourly teams. 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: Staff post shifts they can’t work, colleagues pick them up, and the manager approves with one tap. - Who pays: Managers of cafés, shops and clinics with 10 to 50 hourly staff - Their problem: Swaps happen in group chats, the manager approves in a hurry, and the schedule on the wall stays wrong. No-shows follow, and payroll doesn’t match who actually worked. - Price to test: $3 per staff member a month (a plan in apps/web/config/billing.config.ts) ## Build only this first version 1. The week’s schedule, imported or typed in 2. Post a shift for swap from the phone 3. A colleague claims it and the manager approves 4. A clean record of who worked which shift 5. An email to everyone affected ## 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 - Schedule import and editing - Swap requests and approvals - Push notifications for new swaps ## 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
Want ideas for your own skills?
The free generator writes three while you watch, each with a plan and a starting prompt. Or paste this idea into it for two sharper versions.
More ideas: Back office
Licence and insurance expiry tracker for contractors
Contractors keep every licence, insurance certificate and training record for their crew and subcontractors, with reminders before anything lapses.
Step-by-step procedures with read receipts
Small teams write procedures with photos once, staff confirm they’ve read them, and the owner sees who still needs training.
Client key register for cleaning and care companies
Staff sign client keys out and back with a phone scan, so the office knows who holds every key.