For years, my extended family has co-owned a vacation home. Nice spot, relaxing location. But coordinating who uses it when, or the list of maintenance tasks and who should do what? That part needed help.
Is the home free for use on a particular date? Who’s arriving next? When is maintenance happening? One of the thermostats is flaking out. What was that HVAC company we used, again, with that guy who seems so knowledgeable and responsive? How do you winterize the outdoor sinks properly? Wasn’t there some video I took last year that explained it? Where is it?
Questions like this, but particularly around booking and scheduling, often result in scattered text threads from five different group chats, or various attempts to use a shared Google Calendar. And it would be nice to be able to look back upon the year and see who’s using it a bunch, who might want to give some deference to other requests a bit more this year.
Sound familiar? If you share a vacation home, family cottage, or holiday house with siblings, cousins, or friends, you know exactly what I’m talking about.
The Problem with Generic Calendar Apps
There are approximately eight trillion shared calendar apps out there. I tried several. None of them were built for the specific challenges of sharing a vacation property.
A basic online calendar can show dates to all. Great. But can it:
- Handle booking requests that need approval
- Give people an optional quota of requested night-stays for a given year
- Email all members (optionally) when a booking is made?
- Track annual usage quotas — even the number of denied requests — so everyone gets fair access?
- Store all those random vendor contacts (plumber, electrician, the guy who knows how to winterize the cottage)?
- Document house rules and “how do I…” instructions, including video and images?
- Manage different permission levels for family members versus occasional guests?
No. Because vacation home sharing isn’t just about blocking off dates on a family calendar app. It’s about coordination, fairness, communication, and maintaining all the institutional knowledge that keeps a shared property running smoothly.
Enter OurSharedPlace
So, I built it. Well, really, I booted up AI coding assistant Claude Code and we vibe-coded and tested the whole thing quite rapidly. If you’ve read my post about building PollQR.com with AI, you know I’m a big believer in this approach, particularly for small, focused, productivity web applications.
OurSharedPlace is vacation home scheduling and content management software purpose-built for families and groups managing shared vacation homes, cottages, beach houses, holiday homes… whatever you call that place you love but struggle to coordinate.
How It Actually Works
The Vacation Home Calendar That Makes Sense
At the core is a booking calendar designed specifically for shared properties. When someone wants time at the beach house, they submit a booking request. Administrators review all pending requests and approve them. Simple workflow, but it eliminates the chaos of everyone just claiming dates and hoping for the best.
I added optional annual quotas too. If you’d like, you can assign each family member a maximum number of days per year; entirely up to the “administrator” of the home. The system tracks total requests and quota automatically. No more arguments about who’s hogging the family cottage.
More Than Just a Calendar
The booking system alone would have been worth building, but vacation home sharing needs more infrastructure:
Property Blog & Documentation: Every shared family cabin has quirks. Where’s the water shutoff? WiFi password? How do you work the fireplace without filling the house with smoke? The blog feature lets you document all of this—with photos and even YouTube video tutorials. We embedded ours with step-by-step guides for closing up the beach house for winter.
Contact Directory: One centralized place for all those vendor contacts. The HVAC guy’s number. The plumber who knows the weird pressure issue. The local handyman. The property management company. No more digging through old emails or texts.
Photo Gallery: Showcase your vacation condo with images; any member can upload their own to a shared gallery.
To-Do Lists: Coordinate maintenance tasks. Assign them to specific people. Track what needs doing at the holiday house.
Role-Based Access for Admins, Members and Guests
Not everyone needs full admin access. OurSharedPlace has three levels:
- Administrators: Approve bookings, manage members, control everything
- Members: Request bookings, access all property info, contribute content
- Guests: View-only access for occasional visitors
Each of these levels has varying levels of access to the calendar, photo gallery, blog, contacts list and to-do list.
The Technical Build
I built OurSharedPlace using Next.js 15 (App Router), Supabase for the backend, and Tailwind CSS for styling. Claude Code and I iterated rapidly—I’d describe what I needed, Claude would generate the implementation, I’d review and refine. The RLS (Row Level Security) policies in Supabase were crucial for the permission system. I’ve made sure members and admins can only see properties they belong to, that guests had read-only access to a small group of things, and admins had full control.
For advanced users, I added “embeddability.” That is, our vacation home has a Home Assistant Dashboard — literally a tablet mounted on a wall where the lights, etc. can be controlled. I wanted to expose the blog, contacts list and to-do items there, without duplication. So I built embed functionality. With OurSharedPlace, you can generate a secure token-authenticated URL to display your property blog, contacts, or to-dos on external websites and dashboards. You can regenerate the tokens at any time, and that access goes away. This wasn’t in the original plan but it’s turned out to be super useful.
Who This Is For
OurSharedPlace works for any group managing a shared vacation property:
- Families sharing inherited cottages: Multiple siblings or cousins coordinating a family cottage passed down through generations
- Friends who co-invested: Groups who bought a vacation condo, ski cabin or beach house together
- Multi-family ownership: Several families jointly owning a holiday home
- Fractional ownership situations: Anyone in a timeshare or shared family cabin arrangement where you know the other parties sharing the property
The common thread: multiple people who need fair, coordinated access to one property, when sending emails and text is driving everyone crazy.
Pricing Philosophy
I’m charging $59 per property per year, no matter how many members a given property has. That’s it. No per-user fees—invite unlimited family members. No hidden charges. No tiered pricing nonsense.
Why so simple? Because I built this to solve a real problem in a simple way, with fair pricing. If you’re co-owning a vacation home, you’re already dealing with enough complexity. Your vacation home scheduling software shouldn’t add more.
Every new property gets a 14-day free trial. No credit card required. Try the whole system, see if it works for your situation.
Lessons from Building This
Scratching your own itch works: I built OurSharedPlace because I needed it. Turns out thousands of other families have the exact same problem. When you solve something that genuinely frustrates you, there’s a good chance it frustrates other people too.
AI-assisted development is real: A few days from idea to launch, working evenings and weekends. Claude Code didn’t write perfect code, by any means. I’m a pretty experienced web developer; I knew what to look for. I reviewed everything, interrupted Claude several times, rejected plenty of suggestions, and provided architectural direction. But the velocity was remarkable. A project that would have taken me six months solo took a fraction of that time.
Specialized tools beat generic ones: A purpose-built vacation home calendar beats a generic online calendar every time. When software understands your specific workflow—booking approvals, usage quotas, house rules documentation—it just works better.
SEO Reality Check
Let me be honest about something: I’m hoping OurSharedPlace ranks well for searches like “vacation home scheduling software,” “coordinate vacation home,” “family vacation calendar,” and “shared cottage management.” That’s why this post naturally includes those phrases.
If you’re searching Google for “vacation home sharing” software or “family cottage” coordination tools or “beach house” booking systems, you’re the exact person I built this for.
Try It Yourself
If you’re managing a shared vacation home, family cottage, beach house, vacation condo, or any holiday property with multiple co-owners, take OurSharedPlace for a spin.
Create a free account, set up your property, invite your family or co-owners, and see if it solves your coordination headaches like it solved mine.
No credit card needed to try it out. Cancel anytime if it’s not working for you.
Start Your Free Trial at OurSharedPlace.com →
Have questions about vacation home sharing or OurSharedPlace specifically? Drop me a note, I love hearing how other people tackle this problem.