Multi-tenant lesson scheduling platform for equestrian barns. Built because a barn owner was drowning in scheduling chaos and every existing tool tried to do too much.
The equestrian barn management software market is dominated by tools that try to do everything — horse health records, breeding management, vet tracking, pedigree databases, invoicing, inventory, and somewhere buried in there, lesson scheduling. Platforms like BarnManager, Stable Secretary, and CRIO charge $29-$150/month for features that small lesson barns never use.
The barn owner I built this for had a specific pain: she ran lesson scheduling from a combination of text messages, a paper calendar on the barn wall, and a shared Google Sheet that nobody updated. Missed lessons, double-bookings, and no way to collect payments digitally. She didn't need a horse health database. She needed scheduling that worked.
95% of the 6,200 riding schools in the US are single-owner operations. They need a tool that matches their actual workflow — simple, mobile-first, and affordable. Not an enterprise platform that requires a training session to navigate.
SaddleSync is a multi-tenant Next.js application — each barn gets its own account, its own clients, its own schedule. Barn owners can onboard clients, set up lesson types, manage instructor availability, and accept payments. Clients can book lessons, see their schedule, and pay through the app.
I built it multi-tenant from day one because this isn't a one-barn tool — it's a platform. The first barn validates the product; barns two through fifty validate the business.
Lessons booked over text, written on a paper calendar nailed to the barn wall, and tracked in a shared Google Sheet nobody updates. Double-bookings every week, missed slots every month, and no single source of truth for who's riding when.
One live schedule that owners, instructors, and clients all see. Conflicts get caught at booking time — not at 4 PM when two riders show up for the same slot. Changes propagate instantly across every device.
Chasing Venmo payments and checks at the end of every month. No record of who paid for which lesson, awkward conversations about credit balances, and Sunday-night spreadsheet reconciliation just to figure out what's owed.
Stripe Connect handles payment at booking time. Each barn has its own connected account — money flows directly to the owner with a 2.5% platform fee. Every receipt, refund, and balance lives in the app.
A group text per parent, a different one per client, and no way to send a reminder without typing it manually. Last-minute cancellations get lost in the thread; no-shows cost real money on an empty lesson slot.
Automated reminders go out before each session. Cancellations route through the app with the barn's policy attached — credits applied or cancellation fees enforced based on rules the owner sets once.
Paper intake forms in a binder, signed waivers in a filing cabinet, and no quick way to confirm a new rider's paperwork is complete before their first lesson. The week a lawyer asks for a waiver is the week it can't be found.
Digital intake at sign-up. Waivers are e-signed, stored on each rider's profile, and the system flags incomplete paperwork before a first lesson can be booked. No more rummaging through binders.
End-of-month math done in a spreadsheet. No view of which lesson types are growing, which clients are slipping, or whether this month beats last month until the bookkeeper finishes the reconciliation.
An owner dashboard shows revenue by week and month, top clients, and lesson-type breakdowns in real time. The number on the dashboard is the number — updated the moment a payment clears.
One parent with three kids riding means three sets of payment threads, three calendars to track, and no single login that shows what's coming up for the family. Billing gets sent to the wrong adult, and reminders go to a kid's phone they don't check.
Parents have one account managing each rider as a profile underneath it. Billing routes to the parent, the schedule shows every child's lessons in one view, and reminders go to whoever's actually responsible for showing up.
The competitors fall into three tiers: bloated and expensive (BarnManager, Stable Secretary, CRIO — $29-$150/month, feature overload), generic schedulers repurposed (eSoft Planner, BookyWay — functional but not purpose-built), and free but unsustainable (Equestria.ai — free-forever model that likely won't last). SaddleSync occupies the gap: purpose-built for lesson barns, affordable, and simple enough to use from a phone in a barn aisle.
SaddleSync is live at saddlesync.app. The first barn is onboarding for real-world stress testing. The product was conceived, architected, built, and deployed by one person — from identifying the market gap to writing the Prisma schema to configuring Stripe Connect to deploying on Vercel.
This isn't a design exercise or a prototype. It's a revenue-ready SaaS product with multi-tenant architecture, payment processing, and a go-to-market strategy targeting a specific niche with measurable market size.