Boat Binder
Software for boat owners to organize vessel documents, service history, maintenance information, notes, reminders, and ownership knowledge in one place.
Why I built it
Owning and maintaining a boat involves documents, service history, equipment details, recurring work, notes, and decisions that tend to live in too many places. I built Boat Binder to reduce that mental load and give owners one useful system for the knowledge that keeps a vessel running.
What it brings together
Boat Binder supports vessels, documents, service visits, notes, search, reminders, vessel status, service-summary email, and the invitation and account flows around shared ownership knowledge. Subscription and entitlement work keeps access clear as the product grows.
How it is built
The product is built with Ruby on Rails and PostgreSQL, with Action Text and Active Storage supporting rich notes and documents. It is deployed on Heroku and uses Mailgun for product email, with GitHub supporting the development workflow. Security and entitlement controls are treated as product behavior, not an afterthought.
What I’m learning
The best ownership systems make the next useful action easier without creating another administrative chore. Boat Binder is an ongoing exercise in choosing clarity over feature volume and building around the way owners already think about their vessels.