Operations software for sober living homes

The idea

Sober living homes run on paper: drug test results in a binder, rent in a spreadsheet or cash envelope, house rules enforced from memory. That was tolerable until state NARR affiliates and funders started requiring documented testing, incident logs, and signed resident agreements to certify a home — and certification increasingly gates referrals from treatment centers and courts. Operators now face audit requirements with tooling that is literally a filing cabinet.

Kibu showed that small care operators pay meaningful subscriptions for software whose core promise is passing audits. Sober living is the same shape of buyer with nobody serving them: generic healthcare compliance suites are overkill priced for clinics, and property management tools know nothing about drug tests or violation write-ups. The wedge is building for the house manager’s actual day — bed-level billing, test logging with chain-of-custody notes, write-ups — and making the audit binder a one-click export.

Who pays

The operator pays $99-299/mo across 1-10 houses; against per-bed revenue of $500-900/mo, it is a rounding error that protects certification. The buyer is the owner-operator, often a person in recovery running houses as a mission-plus-business. Distribution is unusually concrete: state NARR affiliate directories list every certified operator with contact info, and affiliate conferences are small enough to attend and own.

MVP scope

• Houses, beds, and resident intake with document uploads
• Append-only logs for drug tests, violations, incidents, and passes
• Bed-level rent billing with Stripe autopay and arrears view
• One-click audit binder PDF export for a date range
• Multi-house dashboard with occupancy and overdue rent
• Skip for v1: insurance billing, EHR integrations, resident mobile app, medication tracking, referral CRM

Build HouseLedger, an operations app for sober living operators running 1-10 houses. Stack: Next.js (App Router), Postgres, Stripe for rent and bed-fee collection, server-side PDF exports (Puppeteer or react-pdf).

Core flow: operator creates houses with beds; residents are admitted to a bed with an intake record (signed resident agreement upload, emergency contact, move-in date, program fee). Day-to-day, the house manager works from a mobile-friendly log screen: record a drug test (panel type, result, observed-by, chain-of-custody note), write up a violation with severity, log an incident, mark a pass/overnight. Rent runs on bed-level billing: each bed has a rate and cycle; Stripe invoices residents or their family payer automatically, and the ledger shows who is behind by house.

Pages: house dashboard (occupancy, overdue rent, tests due), resident profile (timeline of tests, violations, incidents, payments, documents), test logging form, billing, audit export, settings.

Non-obvious details: make every log row append-only with an author and timestamp, corrections as new entries — auditors distrust editable records; the audit export generates a certification-ready PDF binder per NARR-style standards (resident roster, test log, incident log, agreements) for an inspector-selected date range in one click.

Pricing: Solo $99/mo (up to 2 houses), Operator $199/mo (up to 6), Group $299/mo (unlimited plus multi-house rollup reporting).