Share management for CSA farms

The idea

A CSA farmer with 150 members spends Sunday and Monday nights on logistics that have nothing to do with growing food: swap request emails (“no kale for me please”), vacation hold texts, and building per-site pickup checklists in a spreadsheet that breaks every week. The incumbents that once served this market, Farmigo and Local Line, have drifted upmarket or pivoted to wholesale, leaving small farms on Google Sheets and Mailchimp.

The wedge is the weekly cycle, modelled exactly: publish the harvest, open a bounded swap window with real quantity limits, then freeze and emit the two artifacts the farm physically runs on, the aggregate pack list for the barn and the per-site roster for the pickup table. Get Thursday morning right and everything else is bookkeeping.

Who pays

The farmer pays 49 USD/month. With members paying 400 to 800 USD a season, a 150-member CSA is a 75k USD-plus operation, and installment billing alone (Stripe subscription schedules instead of chasing cheques) justifies the price before the hours saved on swaps. Distribution: CSA farmer networks are tight and vocal, so target state CSA coalitions, the CSA Innovation Network, small-farm conferences, and word of mouth between farms that share pickup sites.

MVP scope

• Season, share type, and pickup site setup with public signup
• Stripe pay-in-full and installment billing with failed-payment handling
• Weekly menu publishing and quantity-limited swap window
• Auto-generated aggregate pack list and per-site pickup rosters
• Vacation holds with banked-week credits
• Skip for v1: home delivery routing, farm stand POS, wholesale orders, marketing email campaigns, multi-farm hubs

Build ShareStack, a web app for small CSA farms (50 to 300 members) to run a season. Stack: Next.js (App Router), Supabase (Postgres, Auth, RLS), Stripe for seasonal and installment billing. Magic-link auth for members and farmers.

Data model: Seasons (e.g. Summer 2027, 20 weeks), ShareTypes (full/half/egg add-on, price), PickupSites (name, address, day, window, capacity), Members with a share, site choice, and payment plan (pay in full or 4 monthly installments via Stripe subscription schedules), VacationHolds, WeeklyMenus, Swaps.

Weekly cycle, the heart of the app: farmer publishes this week's box contents Sunday night (e.g. kale bunch, 2 lb tomatoes, garlic). A swap window opens until Tuesday 9pm: members may exchange up to 2 items for alternatives the farmer listed with limited quantities (first-come, decremented transactionally). Wednesday morning the app freezes and generates two outputs: the pack list, aggregating every box by item ("34 kale, 12 chard, 61 lb tomatoes"), grouped by pickup site, and per-site rosters with member names, share type, and any swaps, printable and usable as a checkoff sheet on a phone at the site.

Vacation holds: members bank up to 2 skipped weeks, redeemable as a double box or season-end credit, farmer-configurable.

Pages: public signup with Stripe checkout, member portal (this week's box, swaps, holds), farmer dashboard, weekly menu editor, pack list, site rosters, member admin, billing status.

Pricing: 49 USD/month, free while a farm's first season has under 25 members.