Operational software · Dana Point

Simple ops software in Dana Point.

Single-tenant operational software for Dana Point owner-led businesses: bookings, deposits, manifests, a dashboard the owner reads at the end of the day. Built around your operation, yours to keep.

Start a brief Or email hola@xala.studio
01 · Why this, here

Dana Point runs on harbor businesses booking capacity they track on paper.

Dana Point is a harbor town. The businesses that define it (charter and whale-watch operators, the sportfishing fleet, the fine-dining rooms and luxury hospitality of the Lantern District) all sell capacity against a calendar. A seat on a boat, a table at seven, a slip for the weekend. When you sell capacity, the thing that costs you money is never the work itself. It's the double-booking, the no-show, the deposit that was never confirmed.

What we find is a business running a real fleet or floor on tools that can't see each other. Bookings come through an online form, a phone, and walk-ups, and reconciling them is a person with a paper manifest and a card terminal. The captain or the maître d' holds the true state of the day in their head. It works until a busy Saturday, and then it doesn't.

The fix isn't a hospitality platform built for a cruise line. It's a small single-tenant app that knows your capacity, takes the deposit, confirms the booking, and hands the crew a clean manifest. Built once, owned by you, with no monthly fee skimming a harbor-season margin.

02 · What we build

Just enough software to run the place.

  • Built just for you, not shared with a thousand other companies. You pay to build it once instead of renting it forever.
  • The three to five things you'd actually use every day. Nothing you'd never open.
  • Stripe for payments, Resend for email, Clerk for logins. Boring, proven tools. Nothing exotic to maintain.
  • Full source handoff. You own the repo. No vendor lock-in.
  • Written instructions you can follow on a Saturday morning without calling anyone.
  • Hosted on Vercel + Neon. You control the accounts, we set them up.

From $6,000 · 4 to 10 weeks · An owner-run studio.

03 · What this looks like

Three shapes this takes in Dana Point. These are composites, not named clients.

A charter and whale-watch operator out of the Harbor. Three boats, online bookings, phone bookings, and walk-ups, reconciled on a paper manifest with a card reader at the dock. We build a booking-and-manifest app: an online page tied to live capacity per departure, deposit collection through Stripe, a dock-crew manifest for each sailing, and an end-of-day cash-versus-card report. The captain checks one screen and the day balances itself.

A sportfishing operation running multi-boat trips. Reservations split between a website, a counter ledger, and a deckhand's notebook of who paid and who didn't. We build a reservation app: trip schedule with per-boat capacity, deposit and balance tracking through Stripe, an angler manifest with license and gear notes, and an automatic trip-reminder email. The galley and the gate finally agree.

A fine-dining room in the Lantern District. Private dinners and buyouts booked through an inbox and a reservation app that doesn't track deposits or room conflicts. We build an events app: a private-event request form, an owner-side calendar with room and date conflict detection, deposit invoicing through Stripe, and an automatic confirmation. The Sunday reconciliation disappears.

04 · Honest scope

This is right if you run a real Dana Point business, you can name the three to five workflows eating your week, and you want software you own instead of a platform that bills every month. It is not right if you want a multi-tenant booking product to resell. That is a bigger build, and we refer it out.

We're a San Diego studio; Dana Point is reachable in person inside about 75 minutes, and most of the work runs remote regardless. When it matters, we'll come stand on your dock for an hour. That beats a six-page requirements doc every time.

This page was drafted from a structured brief and hand-edited before launch. The work itself is custom, owner-run, never templated.

Want to talk it through?

One paragraph about your business is enough. Tell us what you need → Or just email hola@xala.studio.

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