Upper Seat

A membership barbershop as an app - book, arrive, sit down, never explain yourself again.

$30,000 / 3 months + ongoing

SwiftUIiOS client, widgets, Live Activities

Kotlin / Jetpack ComposeAndroid

Fastify + NodeAPI

Squarepayments and memberships

About this project

Upper Seat is the booking and membership app for a premium barbershop. The brief was never "let people book online" - it was to remove the phone call, the explanation of what you want, and the wait. A client books or joins the waitlist in a few taps; everything else is remembered, from their Style DNA down to how they take their coffee. The barber opens a briefing before the client sits down, and memberships run on Square subscriptions with tiered benefits and loyalty points.

The challenge

Memberships are Square subscriptions rather than a local flag, so every entitlement derives from the billing system's state - webhooks, reconciliation, and the gap between charged and known to be charged. The bigger lesson was working from someone else's finished vision: the client arrived with a detailed prototype, so the job was translation into a data model that holds up, and pushing back where the prototype and reality disagreed.