SailTo

Organising a week on a boat is a logistics problem disguised as a holiday. Who is coming, who holds which certificate, who sleeps where, who is allergic to what, who bought the diesel, and who owes whom at the end of it.

Most crews solve this with a chat group, a spreadsheet and somebody's notes app. SailTo replaces all three with one shared workspace, and a single invitation link brings everybody into it.

What it does

• Crew. Profiles, sailing certificates, dietary requirements and cabin assignments, in one list the skipper actually maintains.
• Provisioning. Shopping and packing lists that several people can edit without producing three versions of the same list.
• Money. Shared expenses tracked during the trip and settled at the end, so the bill split is not an argument in the marina.
• Schedule. Every leg, briefing and hand-over date on one calendar.
• Offline. The whole thing keeps working without reception and syncs when the boat is back in range.

There is also an assisted meal planner, which sounds like a gimmick until you have provisioned for eight people with four dietary requirements.

Who uses it

Skippers running private charters, clubs coordinating a season, and sailing schools running several training voyages at once — the last group being the reason the multi-trip handling exists at all.

How it is built

A progressive web app rather than two native apps: crews arrive on whatever device they own, usually through a link, and nobody wants to install something for one week on a boat.

Next.js and TypeScript on the front, PostgreSQL behind it, Stripe for subscriptions, and sign-in against our own identity server. It runs in containers on our servers in Germany. The offline layer was the hardest part and is the one thing we would not compromise on: marina reception is reliably bad, and a planning tool that fails exactly when you are on the water is not a planning tool.