Volunteer shifts for clubs and charities
Volunteer shifts for clubs and charities is a SaaS idea for organisers at sports clubs, food banks, festivals and small charities, priced to test at $15 a month per organisation, free for very small groups. Rotas live in spreadsheets and group chats. With it, volunteers sign up for shifts on their phone and get reminders, and organisers see the gaps before the day.
. A starting point we wrote, not market research: run the 7-day test before you build.
What problem does it solve?
Rotas live in spreadsheets and group chats. People forget, swap without telling anyone, and organisers spend the morning of the event phoning around.
Why now: Volunteers run the rest of their week from their phones, and a rota should work the same way.
What do they use today?
Most organisers share a spreadsheet link or pin a paper sheet to a noticeboard, then send reminders themselves, one message at a time. Changes reach them by text, whenever a volunteer thinks to send one.
How does it work?
An organiser creates an event, adds its shifts and roles, and shares a sign-up link. Volunteers pick shifts from the link or the phone app and get a reminder email the day before, and anyone who can’t make it requests a swap for the organiser to approve. One screen shows the gaps for each event, so the organiser fills them days ahead instead of on the morning of the event.
What goes in the first version?
- Events with shifts and roles
- Sign-up from a link or the phone app
- Reminder emails the day before
- Swap requests the organiser approves
- The gaps for each event on one screen
Who pays, and how much?
- Who pays
- Organisers at sports clubs, food banks, festivals and small charities
- Price to test
- $15 a month per organisation, free for very small groups
A flat price per organisation suits groups where a committee pays from a small budget and volunteers are not charged. The free plan for very small groups lets a tiny club start with no budget at all.
How to test it in 7 days
- 1Ask five organisers you know how they run their rotas.
- 2Read r/nonprofit for volunteer scheduling complaints.
- 3Run one event’s rota for a local club.
Where to find the first customers
- r/nonprofit
- Sports club and league organisers
- Local volunteer centres
What are the risks?
- Small groups have little money, so the free plan must lead to paid ones.
- Free forms and spreadsheets are the real competition.
How to build it on shipanysaas
5 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
- Sign-in
- Teams and roles
- Billing
- Emails
- Phone app with All-in
- You build
- Events, shifts and sign-ups
- Swap approvals
- Gap view and reminders
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 Volunteer shifts for clubs and charities. 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: Volunteers sign up for shifts on their phone and get reminders, and organisers see the gaps before the day. - Who pays: Organisers at sports clubs, food banks, festivals and small charities - Their problem: Rotas live in spreadsheets and group chats. People forget, swap without telling anyone, and organisers spend the morning of the event phoning around. - Price to test: $15 a month per organisation, free for very small groups (a plan in apps/web/config/billing.config.ts) ## Build only this first version 1. Events with shifts and roles 2. Sign-up from a link or the phone app 3. Reminder emails the day before 4. Swap requests the organiser approves 5. The gaps for each event on one screen ## Already in the kit: reuse it, never rebuild it - Sign-in: email and password or Google, plus magic links and passkeys you can switch on - 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 - Events, shifts and sign-ups - Swap approvals - Gap view and reminders ## 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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