Sabbath Planner
Church scheduling platform built in under a month, preventing $5,100/yr cost increase
The Business Challenge
Smartsheet's 2026 licensing policy change created an urgent cost problem: all domain editors would need to be licensed. The church had 3 licenses at $900/year, but with approximately 20 editors, costs would balloon from $900/year to $6,000/year. The primary Smartsheet use case was a scheduling workflow with roughly 20 automations handling notifications, week-over-week incrementing, and reports.
Separately, the Sabbath Coordinator was using a free app for order of service management that lacked substantial functionality — no contact management, no notification system, and no mobile-friendly design.
Discovery & Collaboration
I identified scheduling as the highest-value Smartsheet use case and recognized an opportunity to solve two problems at once: replace the costly Smartsheet dependency and give the Sabbath Coordinator a proper tool. Rather than building a simple scheduling replacement, I scoped a comprehensive platform that would handle scheduling, order of service, contact management, and automated communications.
The Strategic Decision
Building a custom application rather than migrating to another SaaS platform was the clear choice. No off-the-shelf tool combined Sabbath-specific scheduling (managing assignments for elders, speakers, worship teams, support roles) with order of service management and automated reminders. The custom build also avoided creating another vendor dependency.
I chose React 19, Firebase, and Cloud Run to keep the stack modern and costs minimal (Firebase's free tier covers the church's usage). The entire build took less than a month.
The Build
Tech Stack: React 19 + Vite 7 (frontend), Node.js 20+ Express (backend), Firestore (DB), Firebase Auth (Google OAuth + Email/Password), SendGrid (email notifications), Firebase Hosting + Cloud Run, GitHub Actions (CI/CD), Playwright (E2E testing).
Key Features:
- Sabbath scheduling: manage assignments for elders, speakers, worship teams, support roles
- Order of Service: editable segments, drag-and-drop reorder, song picker, print-optimized layout
- Contact management: directory of church members eligible for assignments
- Email notifications: automated reminders via SendGrid
- Song library with favorites
- Auto-populated sunset times for Jacksonville, FL
- Light/dark mode
- Role-based access: Admin, Coordinator, Editor, Viewer
- SMS updates for critical changes
- Export print version of Order of Service in clean, readable one-page format
- Mobile-first design — works on phone, laptop, tablet
The Outcome
- Built in less than a month
- Rolled out to elders in February 2026 — members aged 60-70 were able to log in, set up profiles, mark unavailable dates, and update assignments within 10-15 minutes during the initial presentation
- Cost: stays at $900/year until remaining Smartsheet use cases are retired
- Saved church from $5,100/year cost increase ($6,000 - $900)
- Sabbath Coordinator now has proper mobile-friendly Order of Service management
- Everyone involved described the rollout as impressive and intuitive