We built this for our own cabin first.
Casa Cabana runs a four-season cabin in the Columbia Valley in British Columbia, shared by four families since 2001. It was written down because we needed it, and it has been in daily use by our own group since April 2026.
The deck is built around a fifty-year-old apple tree. It gives shade in July and apples in September, and it was never going to be cut down to make the build easier.
The place
A main cabin, a bunkhouse and several outbuildings, in country that gives you two lakes, rivers, hiking, fishing, back-country trails, skiing and mountain biking without going far. Four seasons, which means the property is never simply closed and forgotten.
Twenty-five years of joint ownership has produced a working practice. Each family pays in monthly. Decisions are made together rather than by whoever is loudest. Twice a year everyone shows up to work: the May long weekend to open the place properly, and a weekend in the fall for the bigger projects and to get it ready for winter.
None of that came from software. It came from four families getting it wrong often enough to arrive at something that works.
Where it stopped working
Two things broke, and they broke repeatedly.
One family drove up expecting a quiet weekend to themselves. Another family was already there, and not going anywhere.
Nobody had done anything wrong. Both bookings were real, both were reasonable, and nothing in a group text had made the collision visible before two cars were in the driveway. What we needed was not a system that decided who won. We needed one that showed the overlap early enough for two people to sort it out on the phone.
The second was quieter and cost more. Planning the work weekends, agreeing what the projects actually were, and holding the discussion about them in a place where it survived the conversation. Every year the same arguments were relitigated because the reasoning behind last year's decision had scrolled away in a chat.
What that produced
Three of the more unusual decisions in Casa Cabana come straight out of that history rather than from a product plan.
- Conflicts are flagged, never auto-blocked.Awarding a contested weekend to whoever clicked first is the right answer for a hotel and the wrong one for a family. The software surfaces the overlap, names who is involved, and leaves the conversation to the people who have to live with it.
- The property manager never sees a dollar figure.Groups who employ someone locally face a choice between giving them everything and giving them nothing. There should be a third option, and it should be enforced in the database rather than by hiding buttons.
- Nothing is ever deleted.Twenty-five years of contributions, receipts and maintenance history is not something a group should risk losing because a subscription lapsed. Change plans, cancel, come back. It waits for you.
Who is building it
Ron Visser
Founder
I am one of the four families. My background is technical, and I have started and run software businesses before, so when the cabin's problems turned out to be the same problems every co-owned property has, building the thing properly was the obvious move.
Casa Cabana is a family project rather than a funded startup. That has consequences worth being honest about: it will move at the pace one person can build at, and it will be shaped by what a small number of real groups tell us rather than by a roadmap written in advance. In exchange, there is nobody upstream of you deciding what this product is for.
The cabin group has been using it since April 2026. We are now opening it to the first hundred ownership groups.
What we would like from you
If you own a place with other people, we would like to hear how your group runs it: what you have agreed, what you argue about, and what you are using to hold it together. That is worth more to us at this stage than another feature.
Founding groups get a direct line rather than a support queue, and the build order after this beta will be decided on what they actually use.
Start with the calendar. It's free.
Get your group in, stop the double-bookings, and see the rest for fourteen days without entering a card.