DropInKids
Vertical SaaS for drop-in daycare. Parents book in four steps under two minutes; owners get a branded landing and a real dashboard. Stripe Connect pays owners directly.
The problem we were hired to solve.
Owners juggle phone calls, SMS threads, Facebook Messenger, and a paper calendar. ChildPilot would cost $99/month minimum and was built for full-day daycare, not hourly drop-ins.
Parent picks slot, enters child info, pays, gets confirmation — under two minutes. Owner watches today's bookings and revenue from a dashboard. Money lands in their Stripe account same day.
Context
Drop-in daycare — facilities with flexible schedules where parents leave a child for an hour or two, not a full day. Owners run bookings through phone, SMS, and Facebook. Tools like ChildPilot start at $99/month and assume classic daycare, not the hourly format.
Approach
Next.js (App Router) + Prisma + Neon Postgres. Four-step parent flow with interactive calendar, real-time price calculation, multi-day and multi-child bookings in a single transaction. Custom tariffs — owners create their own categories (e.g. potty-trained vs. not) with different prices. Owner dashboard surfaces today's bookings, weekly + monthly revenue, calendar editor with capacity control, drag-and-drop landing-page editor. Stripe Connect routes money directly to each owner; platform skims 0.5% per booking. Resend powers parent confirmations, owner alerts, 24h reminders. Free / Starter ($19) / Pro ($39) tiers with 14-day trial — two revenue lines: subscription plus per-transaction commission. Ten SEO articles published, JSON-LD, sitemap, llms.txt for AI search.
How this project was actually made.
Every project leaves a paper trail. Figma comments, Notion specs, GitHub history, Vercel deploy logs, Telegram threads, first-week analytics. Numbers below are real and available on request under NDA.
◆ Screenshots of any artifact available on request. Confidential details redacted.
Key features
- ◆Four-step booking — date → child → payment → confirmation
- ◆Custom tariffs — owner sets categories with different prices
- ◆Multi-day, multi-child bookings in a single transaction
- ◆Owner dashboard — today, weekly + monthly revenue, drag-drop calendar
- ◆Stripe Connect — money goes direct to owner, platform takes 0.5%
- ◆Automated email — confirmations, owner alerts, 24h reminders
- ◆10 SEO articles, JSON-LD, sitemap and llms.txt for AI search
Results
Production-ready SaaS in a niche with no direct competitor. Already used by a small learning academy for real bookings. Three signature features (custom tariffs, multi-day booking, multi-child orders) shipped from real client requests during build.
Tech stack
What the client said.
First booking through DropInKids came in on day three. Inside a month we replaced our entire phone-and-Facebook stack. The custom tariff feature alone — being able to charge differently for potty-trained kids — would've cost us a custom build elsewhere.