Browser-based room display billed per room monthly

What to build

A browser-based conference room display app that runs on any iPad or Android tablet, pulls room schedules from Google Calendar in real time, and is sold as a per-room monthly subscription to offices and coworking spaces looking to replace pricey, buggy dedicated room-booking hardware.

Proprietary room tablets like Robin and Evie are expensive and prone to going blank on calendar sync hiccups, opening a gap for a cheap, hardware-agnostic browser display that any office can run on tablets they already own.

Demand

Offices and coworking spaces that already own tablets but are frustrated with costly or unreliable dedicated room-booking hardware are the buyers, and the maker's own launch post shows organic pull from builders and operators who've hit the same problem.

• r/SideProject (Reddit)Social post

  Post titled 'I got tired of pricey room tablets going blank when Google Calendar hiccups — so I made a browser display for any iPad' shared to r/SideProject.

• Maker's own accountNews

  Builder describes personal frustration with pricey room tablets going blank due to Google Calendar sync hiccups as the motivating incident for building a browser-based alternative.

• Maker's own accountNews

  Solution is described as a browser display compatible with any iPad or generic tablet, avoiding proprietary hardware lock-in, with Google Calendar as the data source.

Stack

• Google Calendar API
• Next.js (PWA / kiosk-mode web app)
• Supabase (auth + multi-tenant room/org data)
• Stripe Billing (per-room subscription)
• Vercel
• Service worker for offline caching / auto-reconnect

Solo + AI difficulty

The core build is easy for a solo dev with AI — Google Calendar API integration and a kiosk-mode display UI are well-trodden territory, so an MVP for a single org is doable in about 1-2 weeks. The harder, less obvious work is making the browser tab itself bulletproof (surviving sleep/lock, Wi-Fi drops, auto-refresh, silent crashes) and building multi-tenant billing/admin so it scales past one customer.

Entry threshold

Very low barrier: a single developer can build the calendar-sync and display logic in days using the Google Calendar API, the main effort is polishing sync reliability, offline handling, and wake-from-sleep edge cases rather than raw feature scope.

Window

3-6 months

Where to find first users

• r/SideProject and r/sysadmin
• Product Hunt launch
• Coworking space operator communities and Facebook groups
• Direct outreach to small offices currently paying for Robin/Evie

Competitors

• Robin
• Evie
• Envoy Rooms

Counter-signals & risks

• Incumbents like Robin and Evie have established enterprise sales channels, integrations (SSO, calendar admin controls, analytics), and hardware reliability guarantees that a browser-only tool may lack, making displacement harder than the pitch implies.

• A $10/room/month price point may be too low to sustain a business once support, uptime, and multi-calendar-provider (Outlook/Exchange) integration costs are factored in.

• Relying on a browser tab left open on a shared iPad introduces its own failure modes (browser crashes, OS sleep/lock, auto-updates, Wi-Fi drops) that could reproduce the same reliability complaint the product claims to solve.