Live Product

SaddleSync

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.

$55/mo Per barn · Stripe Connect payments

6,200 riding schools, zero simple scheduling tools

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.

Multi-tenant SaaS with payment processing

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.

Next.js TypeScript PostgreSQL Prisma Stripe Connect Vercel Tailwind CSS

Every choice was deliberate

Multi-Tenant
Shared database with tenant isolation via row-level filtering. Single-tenant would be simpler but doesn't scale to 50+ barns without operational overhead. Multi-tenant from day one means the codebase, deployment, and database all handle growth without architectural changes.
Stripe Connect
Connected accounts let each barn accept payments directly. The platform takes a 2.5% transaction fee. This aligns incentives — SaddleSync earns more when barns process more lessons. No flat fee that punishes small operations.
$55/month
Priced below the bloated competitors, above the generic schedulers. Full-suite barn management platforms charge $29-$150/month. Generic booking tools (Calendly, Acuity) don't understand equestrian workflows. $55 is a no-brainer for a barn doing $5K-$20K/month in lesson revenue.
Simplicity
The most common complaint across competitor reviews: "unintuitive." Barn staff are managing horses, not sitting at desks. Every feature in SaddleSync passes a test: can you use it while standing in a barn aisle on your phone? If not, it doesn't ship.

The competitive landscape

6,200
US Riding
Schools
95%
Single-Owner
Operations
$177B
US Horse
Industry
7.2M
Horses
in US

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.

From problem to live product

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.