Operations software for sober living homes

The idea

Sober living is a paper industry: bed fees in a notebook, drug test results on a clipboard, house rules enforced from memory. That was fine until NARR-affiliate certification and state oversight started requiring documented testing, incident logs, and signed resident agreements — now operators face audits with a filing cabinet. Kibu’s $234k MRR proves small care operators pay real money for software whose pitch is staying compliant with the people who fund and license them; sober living is the same buyer psychology with no default vendor.

The wedge is building for the house manager — often a senior resident with a phone, not a laptop — rather than for a clinical director. Generic behavioral-health EHRs are overkill and overpriced for a business whose units are beds, tests, and write-ups. Bed-level billing plus one-click audit packs is the entire product.

Who pays

Operators running 1-10 houses at $99-299/mo — real money to them, but a rounding error against one occupied bed at $600-900/month, and certification pressure makes it non-optional. Distribution is unusually concrete: state NARR affiliates publish member directories of certified homes, and affiliate conferences and Facebook operator groups are small enough that one respected operator’s endorsement moves the market.

MVP scope

• Houses, beds, and resident admissions with agreement uploads
• Mobile-friendly daily logs: drug tests, violations, incidents, curfew checks
• Per-bed rent billing via Stripe with resident balance ledgers
• One-click audit PDF pack for a date range
• Immutable logs with correction entries
• Skip for v1: insurance billing, clinical notes and treatment plans, resident-facing app, e-signatures, multi-operator franchising

Build HouseLedger, an operations web app for sober living operators.

Core flow: an operator creates houses, then beds within each house, then
admits residents to beds with an intake form: emergency contact, program
phase, signed resident agreement uploaded as PDF, and move-in date. Daily
operations run from a house-manager view on a phone browser: log a drug
test (panel type, result, observed-by, chain-of-custody note, photo of
the cup), write up a rule violation with severity, record an incident,
and mark curfew checks. Rent is billed per bed via Stripe — weekly or
monthly schedules, partial payments, and a balance ledger per resident
with late flags. The audit-export screen generates a PDF pack for a NARR
affiliate or state inspection: census history, test log, incident log,
and agreements for a chosen date range, one click.

Stack: Next.js App Router with TypeScript, Postgres via Prisma, Stripe
for rent collection, server-side PDF exports with react-pdf.

Pages: house/bed dashboard with occupancy, resident profile with
timeline, daily-log entry screens, rent ledger, audit exports, settings.

Non-obvious details: make every log row immutable with correction
entries instead of edits — auditors distrust editable records; support
third-party payers (a parent paying a resident's rent) as separate
Stripe customers linked to the resident ledger.

Pricing: $99/mo up to 2 houses, $199/mo up to 6, $299/mo unlimited.