LeavePilot, a leave management tool born from a real problem
It started as an internal tool for a company with several sites. Today it hosts different companies on shared infrastructure. The move between those two things is the part worth talking about.
LeavePilot is a web platform for managing employee holidays, hourly leave and remote work, with a shared calendar, approval workflows, department management, payroll exports and AI-generated reporting. It is free for up to five employees and is built by MAXYMIZE.
Visit the LeavePilot website Features, plans and a free tier for up to five employees.
The problem it solves
In small and mid-sized companies, absence tracking usually lives in a spreadsheet only one person really understands, plus a trail of scattered messages. It holds up as long as that person is around and nobody argues about a balance.
Full HR suites do solve this, but they are designed for much larger organisations: modules, licences, long configuration cycles. A company with fifteen employees ends up paying for a system built for a different scale and using a fraction of it.
LeavePilot sits in between. It covers the whole path, from a request made on a phone to the export your payroll accountant needs, and you can be up and running in a day.
The decisions that mattered
The project began for one company and gradually became a platform hosting several. That shift forces a few choices that are best made early.
Data isolation enforced by the structure
When several companies share one database, the worst failure is not the server going down: it is one company seeing another one data. So organisation membership is a condition of data access, not a filter someone has to remember to add. A badly written query comes back empty.
You book a day off by clicking that day
The calendar is not a summary view, it is where the work happens. That costs real development time: multi-day selection, overlaps between colleagues, per-department views, all of it working on a six-inch screen. In exchange people actually use it, instead of messaging their manager the way they did before.
Part-days handled by the data model
Someone stepping out for a two-hour appointment has not taken a day off. Modelling everything in whole days would have been quicker, but adding hours later would have meant reworking every balance, every total and every export already in production. We preferred doing it at the start.
Serverless database for spiky traffic
Leave management runs in waves: the weeks before summer, the end of the year, and very little in between. With a serverless database the bill follows actual usage, which is what lets us keep a free tier for up to five employees without losing money on it.
The language model never touches the numbers
Summary reports are written by a language model, but it receives data that has already been calculated. It does not approve requests and does not work out balances: that stays deterministic code you can audit. On matters affecting people employment terms it did not seem sensible to do otherwise.
What it is built with
Technologies chosen to handle the uneven load this domain produces and to keep running costs down.
Interface
- Next.js 15
- TypeScript
- Tailwind CSS
- shadcn/ui
- FullCalendar
Data
- Serverless PostgreSQL
- Drizzle ORM
- Versioned migrations
Infrastructure
- Serverless functions
- Object storage
- Continuous deployment
Advanced features
- Generative AI reporting
- Italian, English and Spanish
- Payroll exports
What this means for your project
If you are planning a platform that has to serve multiple customers, we have already done the work on these.
- Multi-tenant architectures where data isolation depends on how the system is built, not on how careful whoever writes the next query happens to be.
- The route from internal tool to sellable product. It is usually the cheapest way to validate a SaaS: solve a concrete problem for someone first, generalise afterwards.
- Free tiers that actually hold up, because infrastructure costs scale with usage and the numbers still work with plenty of non-paying users.
- Language models inside operational processes, with a clear line between what the AI may write and what has to stay verifiable calculation.
Frequently asked questions
What is LeavePilot?
LeavePilot is a web platform for managing employee holidays, hourly leave and remote work: calendar-based requests, approvals, automatic balances, department management, payroll exports and AI-generated reports. It is built by MAXYMIZE and free for up to five employees.
Who is it built for?
Small and mid-sized companies, roughly five to two hundred employees, currently tracking absence through spreadsheets and messages and with no need for a full HR suite. It supports multiple sites and departments within the same organisation.
Is my company data separated from other companies?
Yes. Organisation membership is a structural condition of data access rather than a filter applied case by case: a request that does not correctly identify the company comes back empty.
Can you build a SaaS platform for my idea?
Yes. We usually start with a working minimum version in four to eight weeks, enough to test the idea with real users before investing in the rest. Our how we work page covers engagement models, timelines and indicative price ranges.
Have a platform in mind?
The cheapest way to find out whether an idea works is to build its minimum version and put it in front of real users. Let us talk it through.