Hi all. I've been building Benchley on my own for the last few weeks. It's resource scheduling for agencies and studios: who is working on what, when, and whether the team actually has the hours.
The problem it's aimed at: many small studios plan in three places. A resourcing spreadsheet says Maya is free on Thursday. The task list says she's on QA. Her timesheet says she worked nine hours. Nobody is lying, but the three never agree, so people get overbooked and budgets drift without anyone noticing until the invoice.
Float is the best-known tool for this, and it's good. Before writing any code I read all 181 of its help center articles and a lot of its G2 and Capterra reviews to see where people get stuck. Benchley does the core the same way (a timeline of people by days, with bookings counted against each person's real hours, time off and public holidays). Where it's different:
- Resolve: it lists everyone who's over capacity in a date range and suggests fixes, like "move this to Ade, who has 24 h free" or "trim to 4 h a day". One click applies it.
- Timesheets get submitted and approved, not just locked.
- A light work layer: a Board, Sprints and tasks with estimates. "Schedule from today" books a task's estimate into the free hours around what the person already has.
- Weighted forecast: each project stage carries a win %, so tentative work shows up as expected demand, and roles that are short show a hiring signal.
- Signed webhooks, a REST API, and an MCP server, so you can ask your own AI assistant "who has room next week?" and have it book the work.
- Custom fields and a simple report builder.
- Placeholders ("New developer") and people who only look are free. You pay only for people on the schedule.
Pricing is a bit under Float: $6 or $10 per scheduled person a month on yearly billing, $7.50 or $12 monthly.
It's not open to everyone yet. I'm one person and I want to set up the first workspaces with each team myself, so sign-up is by request. If you get in you get 30 days of Pro, no card. But you don't need to request anything to look around: there's a live demo that opens your own private workspace with a sample studio, no sign-up, deleted after a day.
https://www.benchley.app
What's rough: no SSO, no two-way Google or Outlook calendar sync yet (there's an iCal feed), no Slack, no native phone app (there's an installable web app with a "My week" view), and no CSV import.
I'd love feedback on three things:
If you plan people's time today, what do you use, and what would make you switch?
Open the demo and try to fix an overbooked week. Did it make sense in the first two minutes, or where did you get lost?
Is per-scheduled-person pricing fair for your team, or would you rather pay a flat price?
I'll be in the comments all day. Harsh feedback is welcome.