Marko answers that question every second your gate is open.
A tablet app that checks a family in without typing a single letter, checks them out with one scan, and keeps working when the Wi-Fi drops.
Mark them in. Mark them out. Built for one pool. Customized for yours.
| Name | Age | Swim test |
|---|---|---|
| Nora Alvarez | 11 | ✓ Yes |
| Sam Alvarez | 7 | ✗ No |
I'm not a software company. I help run a members-only pool, and for years our front gate ran on a three-ring binder, a highlighter, and a lot of squinting.
It mostly worked. But it couldn't tell us how many people were actually inside. Not within twenty, anyway — and we had a capacity number we were supposed to respect. Guests got waved through and never written down. Families forgot to sign out, so the count only ever went up. Two households swore they'd never picked up a season key, and we had no way to prove otherwise.
So I looked at what we could buy. Most of it was built for billing and registration first, with check-in bolted on at the end. All of it assumed a reliable internet connection, which our pool deck does not have. And none of it knew what a guest pass balance was, or that our snack shack runs on prepaid points, or that a kid can't go past the rope until they've passed a swim test.
So I built exactly what our staff needed, and nothing they didn't. Sixteen-year-old lifeguards with wet hands learned it in about five minutes. The count is right at closing time. Members can look at our website before they load the car and see how crowded it is.
It works so well that I'd like to see whether it can work for you too — which is really what this page is about.
These are the actual reasons it got built, in the order they annoyed us.
Every check-in and check-out updates one live number. Staff can open the roster at any moment and see exactly which households are still inside.
Before: a guess, and a manual recount whenever it mattered.Staff tap a last-name letter, tap the family, tap plus for each person. No keyboard. A barcode scan skips straight to the household.
Before: hunting a name on a printed list while a line built up behind.Guests are counted separately from household members at the moment of entry, and the remaining guest-pass balance shows right on the check-in form.
Before: waved through, remembered later, argued about in August.A separate key-pickup tab lists only the households that still need one. Once a key is handed over and recorded, that household leaves the list.
Before: a paper checklist, and two families with two keys.The app keeps running on whatever it last synced. Check-ins, check-outs and key actions queue on the device and upload when the connection returns.
Before: back to paper, then an evening of data entry.The live count publishes straight to the pool's public website, so members can check before they drive over — and the phone at the front desk stops ringing.
Before: members calling the desk, or showing up to a full deck.Four screens cover almost all of a shift. The rest is there when you need it.
Member Lookup is the front door. Big letter groups break 200 households into short, tappable lists — no keyboard, no scrolling past everyone.
Currently at Pool shows every household that's checked in and hasn't left. When the number on screen and the number on the deck disagree, you can see exactly which family to look for.
| Household | Members | Guests |
|---|---|---|
| Alvarez | 3 | 1 |
| Barnes | 2 | — |
| Delgado | 4 | 2 |
| Hayashi | 3 | — |
| Okafor | 2 | — |
| Whitfield | 5 | 1 |
This is the feature everything else depends on. If leaving is even slightly annoying, members skip it and your count is worthless by 2pm.
Last: Delgado checked out
6 people · 4:41pm → 6:57pm
The things that don't seem important in May and consume your entire June.
14 households still need a season key
✓ Whitfield — key issued Jun 6, 10:52am
No narration, nothing to click. Every household shown is invented.
Saturday, 2:04pm. A family arrives at the gate.
Sample data throughout. No real member information is shown.
Outdoor pools have bad connections. Sun, concrete, splash zones and a signal that comes and goes. The app assumes all of it.
Staff open the app while connected in the morning. The full roster caches to the device.
Check-ins, check-outs, key issues and purchases keep working and queue locally. Staff carry on.
The queue uploads automatically. Your master records and the public website catch up.
iPads, Android tablets, or a rugged tablet with a paired scanner. Kiosk mode for an unattended station.
I want to be straightforward about what this is. It isn't a generic platform with a settings page deep enough to cover every club in the country. It's a system built to fit one pool exactly — which is precisely why it works so well there.
Because I built it that way, I know exactly which parts are ours and which parts are universal. Implementation means rebuilding the specific parts around your rules.
You don't change how your pool works to fit the software. That's the whole pitch.
Every pool answers these differently:
I'd rather hear about your gate than talk about mine. Answer one question or all of them — anything you send genuinely shapes what gets built next. No obligation, no follow-up sequence.
What you'd pay depends on the size of your membership and how much customization your operation actually needs. A 120-household neighborhood pool that just wants clean check-in and an accurate count is a different project from a 900-household club with tiered guest rules and a snack bar POS.
So the honest answer is: tell me how your pool runs and I'll give you a real number. No pressure to decide anything on the call.
Fifteen minutes, screen shared, real app. I'll show you a family checking in, the count updating, and what happens when I turn the Wi-Fi off mid-shift.