Violation tracking for self-managed HOAs

The idea

Roughly a third of US HOAs are self-managed by volunteer boards, and enforcement is the job everyone hates. Violations get logged in email threads and someone’s phone photos, notice letters go out late or inconsistently, and when a fined homeowner pushes back, the board can’t produce the paper trail. Courts and state statutes require formal escalating notice with cure periods; miss a step and the fine is unenforceable.

The wedge is process-in-a-box: photo-logged violations, templated letters that cite the association’s own rules, deadline tracking that says exactly when escalation is allowed, and Lob to put certified mail in the post without anyone visiting a post office. The audit trail is the product; the letters are just its output.

Who pays

The buyer is the board of a self-managed association of 30 to 300 homes, paying $39/mo from HOA funds rather than personal money, which makes price sensitivity unusually low. Certified mail through Lob is billed at cost plus a margin. Distribution: state HOA leadership associations, self-managed HOA Facebook groups, and HOA attorneys, who would rather their clients follow process than generate billable disasters.

MVP scope

• Mobile violation logging with photos and rule citations
• Escalating letter generation from templates with merge fields
• Physical mail via Lob, including certified, with tracking attached
• Cure-deadline dashboard showing what can escalate and when
• Immutable audit trail and per-property violation history
• Skip for v1: dues and accounting, homeowner portal, architectural requests, board voting, fine payment collection

Build CureNotice, a violation-tracking tool for self-managed HOA boards. Stack: Next.js App Router, Supabase (Postgres, storage, magic-link auth), Lob for physical mail. Bill with Stripe Checkout.

Core flow: a board member logs a violation from their phone: pick the property from the association's address list, pick a violation type from the association's own rule list (each mapped to a CC&R section reference), add photos and a note. The app tracks each violation through the association's notice sequence: courtesy notice, first formal notice, final notice before fine, each generated from letter templates that merge in the property, rule citation, photos, and a cure-by deadline computed from configurable periods. Letters send via Lob as first-class or certified mail without leaving the app, and the Lob tracking status attaches to the violation record. A deadlines dashboard shows every open violation, days remaining to cure, and which are ready to escalate; closing requires a resolution photo or note.

Pages: violation log with per-property history, new-violation mobile flow, letter template editor with merge-field preview, deadlines dashboard, association settings (rules list, notice periods, letterhead), billing.

Implementation details: every state change is an immutable audit row (who, when, what), because this record is what survives a challenge; generate letters as PDFs and store them alongside the Lob delivery events.

Pricing: $39/mo per association, paid from HOA funds, via Stripe.