Today I'm officially releasing Shiftaru — an app that matches customer requests to staff availability and builds your schedule for you.
For months, every post in this series has carried the same line: "in active development, free practice mode only." Today, for the first time, I get to say it plainly — this is the real thing. I built it on my own, so let me write this one with a little more heart than usual.
🎉 Now live
Shiftaru is officially released. The free practice mode still works exactly as before — no signup.
👉 https://shiftaru.com
What Shiftaru does
In one sentence: it matches customer requests to staff availability and builds the schedule automatically.
Give it your real-world rules — area, certifications, requested times, working-hour caps — and even at hundreds of bookings it produces a conflict-free draft in seconds. On-location photography, tutoring, home care, multi-store retail: whatever makes your industry hard to schedule, Shiftaru takes the weight off with a system.
Why I built this
It started because I kept seeing the same scene.
Someone building a schedule, eyes darting between two tables, solving a puzzle in their head. "She was free that day… but if I put her here it clashes with another booking." Every week, last week's schedule is useless and you start from zero. One person calls out sick, and the whole thing cascades.
That isn't a failure of the person doing it. There are simply more constraints than a human hand can hold. So let the machine hold them, and let the person make only the final call. That thought was the beginning of everything.
The one thing I refused to compromise on
There was one line I would not cross while building this.
I would not store your customers' personal data on my server.
Collecting user data in the cloud has become the default, all in the name of convenience. But scheduling touches names, contacts, addresses, care details — some of the most sensitive information there is. Was putting that on someone else's server (mine) really the best design? It never sat right with me.
So Shiftaru runs entirely inside your browser. Nothing is sent to my server. Not "we'll guard it carefully," but "we never receive it, so there's nothing to leak." That's the one line I held all the way to the end. (More on that in the local-first post.)
Honestly, it wasn't easy
The road here wasn't a straight line.
Google's OAuth review, in particular, sent me back again and again. Rejected on the same point, reword it, rejected again. For a while I couldn't even tell what the real problem was — some nights I nearly gave up.
Then one day it finally clicked: it wasn't the wording, it was the mechanism. Once I understood the real cause, the fix was obvious — and it passed. When the approval email came through, I actually said something out loud.
And though I thought I was building this alone, I wasn't. Everyone who tried the practice mode, who read these posts and sent a note, who told me "this part is confusing" — every one of those pushed me to this launch. Thank you, truly.
What changes now that it's live
The biggest thing: you can now use it for real, with confidence.
Until now, generating a Google Form showed an "unverified app" warning the first time, with a cap on how many people could respond. Passing the review removes both. You can hand the forms to real customers and staff without a second thought.
But the thing I care about most hasn't changed
I didn't want "officially released" to mean "now pay up."
Shiftaru still lets you exercise the whole matching engine before you pay. The free practice mode is the same as always — and because you can set the numbers yourself, you can test it at your scale, 20 people or 500, and feel the speed and the flow for yourself.
See with your own eyes that it makes your weekly rebuild easier — and if it doesn't fit, walk away, no hard feelings. I just want you to try it.
Pricing
- Weekly — $40 / week — for a short trial run
- Monthly — $150 / month — the main plan (cheaper per week)
One license works on up to 3 devices. Payment goes through a Merchant of Record, so your card details never reach me. You only pay when you enter real operation — importing real data, exporting CSVs, generating forms. (More in the pricing post.)
What's next
I see this launch as a start, not a finish line.
There are more industries to support, and I want to reach beyond Japan — this blog now has an English edition for exactly that reason. I'll keep making it better, quietly, listening to the people who use it.
One last thing
If you're worn down by scheduling every single week — or if putting your customers' data on someone else's server has ever given you pause — Shiftaru was built for both of those.
No signup required. Just open the practice mode and try it once.
Thank you for reading this far. Here goes.
- ▶ https://shiftaru.com — free practice mode, no signup
- ▶ Read more: Shiftaru Blog