I replaced a $600/month booking platform with JavaScript

What problem does this solve?

A group of former Colorado Avalanche players and coaches runs two related things: Lacroix Hockey, a nonprofit youth hockey organization, and Drill House Sports Center, the training facility attached to it.

I came in on the Drill House side after a previous developer left the work half-finished. So the first job was not technical at all. They had been let down once already, and nothing I built was going to be trusted until that was dealt with. I spent the early part of this engagement listening.

They were also paying MindBody more than $600 a month for booking and payments, on a business whose actual booking needs were much narrower than what that platform is built to do.

What constraints did it have to work inside?

Two properties with genuinely different needs. Lacroix Hockey is a nonprofit that needed to be maintainable by people who are not developers. Drill House needed custom booking behaviour that off-the-shelf platforms charge a lot to approximate.

Whatever replaced MindBody had to keep full functionality. A cheaper tool that loses a feature the business depends on is not a saving, it is a problem deferred to whoever handles the first booking it cannot take.

What did I build?

Lacroix Hockey on Wix and Drill House Sports Center on WordPress, and custom JavaScript booking and payment tools for Drill House replacing MindBody.

The booking tools cover custom flows for summer camps with waivers, extended custom form fields, and both down-payment and monthly payment options.

Decisions

Recommend less work than they came to buy. The advice that made this client money was not a build. Lacroix Hockey did not need a custom site. It needed a site that volunteers could update without calling me first, so I moved them onto a platform that fit and charged them for less work.

That is also most of why the relationship recovered. They had already paid somebody to build something they could not maintain. Telling them the cheaper option was the right one bought more trust than any feature would have.

Replace MindBody instead of negotiating the bill down. Cost was not really the problem. Camp registration with waivers, extended custom fields, and down-payment and monthly payment terms were all things the platform made awkward and expensive at the same time. Building those flows directly meant the booking experience matched how the business actually sells, and the 95 percent saving fell out of that. It was the byproduct, not the target.

Two platforms on purpose, not by accident. Running the nonprofit on Wix and the training center on WordPress looks inconsistent from the outside. It is the right split: one needs to be editable by volunteers, the other needs custom booking logic that WordPress will host without fighting.

Outcome

Monthly software cost went from more than $600 to $25. A 95 percent cut, with nothing given up to get it.

I worked with this organization for three years after the developer they had before me walked away from it.