Why BatchBuddy is completely free

My mom has been teaching kids for over a decade.

She runs small home batches: drawing, craft, sometimes just sitting with kids who need a patient hand guiding them through schoolwork. She loves every single one of her students. She remembers their birthdays, their moods on bad days, which parent needs a gentle nudge and which one needs a firm one.

But behind all of that warmth, there was a mess she could never seem to fix.

A worn-out notebook tracked who had paid, who hadn't, which batch they were in. WhatsApp groups blurred together, a parent asking about attendance in the same thread as a recipe she'd shared. Every month-end, she'd spend hours cross-checking pages, trying to figure out who still owed her money, who had been absent three weeks in a row, whether she'd already sent that reminder or just thought about it.

I watched her stress about it. Not the teaching. She never stressed about that. The admin. The invisible, thankless pile of admin that came with running classes for 30+ kids on her own.

So I built BatchBuddy for her. Not as a side project. Not to launch a startup. Just so she could stop worrying about the spreadsheet and get back to doing what she actually loves.

She started using it. Within two weeks, she told me she felt “lighter”. She knew exactly who had paid, who was overdue, which batch had a session tomorrow. She sent receipts with one tap. She stopped staying up late hunting through notebooks.

That feeling, watching her use something I built and actually feel relief, is why this exists.

And it made me realize: she's not alone.

There are thousands of small instructors like her. Karate coaches running evening classes out of a rented hall. Tutors squeezing in four sessions a day between their own jobs. Music teachers with 20 students who each pay a little and mean a lot.

These people don't need enterprise software. They need something simple, reliable, and, critically, free. Because their margins are tight and their time is precious.