Why this exists
Seating charts are a small job that eats a disproportionate amount of a teacher’s attention. Getting one right is invisible; getting one wrong costs you a term of low-grade friction you cannot quite explain to anyone.
The problem with the existing options
Every seating chart tool we looked at made one of three trades. Some are free but produce something that looks like it was printed in 2008 — fine for you, useless to hand to a substitute. Some are genuinely good but put the parts you need behind a subscription a teacher is expected to pay for personally. And nearly all of them, free or paid, ask you to upload a list of children’s names to a server so a company can hold them. Each trade is defensible alone. Together they explain why so many teachers still make seating charts by hand, in a document, every term.
What we did instead
The whole tool runs in your browser. Student names go into local storage on your own machine and stay there — not as a policy we promise to honor, but as an architecture with nowhere else to put them. That one decision cascades: there is no login because there is no account to log into, there is no per-user server bill so there is no need for a paid tier, and there is no student database to breach, subpoena, or quietly change the terms on in three years.
The part we were stubborn about
Print quality. A seating chart is one of the few pieces of software output that gets printed, laminated, and left on a desk for someone else to use. So the PDF is treated as the real product rather than an afterthought: a proper page frame, a legible tag legend, an orientation marker, real selectable text instead of a screenshot of a canvas, and a Substitute view that strips accommodation tags — because a sub needs names, and does not need to know who has an IEP.
Who builds it
A very small operation: one person, and a lot of teacher feedback. That is a genuine limitation and worth knowing before you rely on it — expect fast fixes and no support desk. It is also why the local-first architecture matters for you rather than just for us. If this project stopped tomorrow, your charts would still be on your machine and your PDFs would still print.
What it will never do
It will never require an account to make a seating chart. It will never sell or share student data. It will never put a feature you had yesterday behind a paywall today. And it will never become an all-in-one classroom suite — this does one job, and the way it stays good at that job is by declining the next twelve.
Make one and see
The fastest way to judge any of this is to build a chart. It takes about a minute and asks nothing of you first.
Start building →