Hour compliance tracker for host families

The idea

Host families sign up to precise State Department rules — 45 hours a week, 10 a day, a day and a half off weekly, a full weekend off monthly, education time — and then track compliance on a paper calendar stuck to the fridge. Violations are not theoretical: they surface in mid-placement disputes, can end the placement, and torch the USD 9-10k in agency fees already paid. The schedule also drifts, ten minutes at a time, into exactly the overage nobody intended.

The wedge is baking the rules into the schedule itself, so the grid turns red before a violation exists rather than after. The second half is the dual confirmation: au pair and host each sign off the week, producing a timestamped record. In the he-said-she-said disputes that sponsor agencies actually adjudicate, the family with the signed monthly summaries wins.

Who pays

The host family, GBP 7 a month against a five-figure annual programme cost, bought for the same reason people buy insurance. The buying trigger is a new placement or a first dispute. Distribution: host family Facebook groups (large, active, and full of rule questions), au pair agency local coordinators who field compliance disputes and would rather prevent them, and SEO on “au pair hours tracker”, a query with clear intent and no serious product answering it.

MVP scope

• Weekly schedule grid with live rule validation and plain-English warnings
• All five programme rules encoded, plus education hours tracking
• Dual weekly confirmation flow with correction proposals and week locking
• Monthly PDF summary with timestamped sign-offs
• Compliance dashboard with rolling totals, Stripe subscription
• Skip for v1: stipend/payment tracking, agency-side accounts, multi-au-pair households, and non-US programme rule sets

Build PairHours, a web app that keeps US host families compliant with State Department au pair programme rules. Stack: Next.js (App Router), Supabase (Postgres + magic-link auth), Stripe.

Core flow: a host parent creates the household, invites the au pair by email, and builds each week on a schedule grid (drag to create shifts). The programme rules are hard-coded as validators that run on every edit: max 45 hours/week, max 10 hours/day, at least 1.5 consecutive days off per week, one full weekend (Fri evening to Mon morning) off per month, and a tracker for the required academic hours. A shift that would break a rule renders amber at 90% of a limit and red past it, with a plain-English explanation ("this shift takes Tuesday to 10.5 hours; the daily cap is 10").

Pages: weekly schedule grid, month view with the weekend-off indicator, compliance dashboard (rolling totals, rule status tiles, education hours progress), monthly summary, and household settings.

Implementation details: both parties confirm — at week end, the au pair reviews logged hours and taps Confirm or proposes corrections; the host approves and the week locks. Locked weeks compile into a monthly PDF summary with both confirmations timestamped, which is the evidence trail if a dispute ever reaches the sponsor agency. Store all times in the household timezone and handle the Friday-evening weekend boundary explicitly (configurable cutoff, default 7pm).

Pricing: GBP 7/month or GBP 60/year per household via Stripe, 30-day free trial timed to placement start.