I help manage a larger campground, and we needed a way to track maintenance and service requests. It’s a really niche market though. Most campground software is built for small parks or is all about bookings, and general property management tools don’t get things like seasonal sites and cottages spread across a big property. Nothing fit. So I tried building it myself with Claude. I am NOT a developer. Month one: just the regular chat For the first month or so I had no idea Claude Code existed. I was literally asking for code in the chat, copying it into files, running it, hitting errors, pasting the errors back. Over and over. It worked, kind of, but it got messy fast. Files getting out of sync, me pasting the wrong version, losing track of what changed where. Then Opus 5.5 came out When Opus 5.5 launched it popped up in Claude and caught my eye, so I gave it a try. That’s around when I also figured out Claude Code was a thing. Honestly a night and day difference. Instead of me being the middleman copying and pasting everything, it could actually see the whole project and make the changes itself. Stuff that used to take me an evening of back and forth got done in one go. I kind of wish someone had smacked me and told me about it in week one lol. What the app does now: Work orders, quotes, and staff assignments for our sites and cottages Email + text notifications when new jobs come in Our website forms for propane and winterizing feed straight into it, and propane orders get auto-sorted into a morning or afternoon run A winterizing tracker for our ~350 sign-ups a season Hydro meter readings entered in the field, then reviewed and invoiced by the office Cottage sales tracking Everyone has their own login with different access levels My favourite part: there’s a button that uses Claude to turn the techs’ messy shop notes into a clean summary for the customer. Using Claude to build an app that uses Claude felt pretty full circle lol. It’s also fully server-based, so staff can pull it up from anywhere on the property instead of it living on one office computer. And I keep adding stuff as we go. Someone says “it’d be nice if it could do X” and a lot of the time I can just go build it. That part still feels kind of wild to me. Email/SMS setup was easily the most painful part, Claude Code or not. Is the code pretty? No idea. Would a real dev laugh at it? Probably. But it works and it’s built around how we actually run things. Tip for other non-coders: if you’re still copying code out of the chat window like I was, try Claude Code sooner than I did. Anyone else using it for niche business tools? Curious how you’re handling hosting and keeping things maintained long-term. submitted by /u/Wardy019
Originally posted by u/Wardy019 on r/ClaudeCode