SaaS · Spain

CitaCatch

A public alert product for a government booking portal, where the opening being watched for lasts about ninety seconds.

Next.jsScheduled checksEmail and TelegramPayments
CitaCatch interface
What changed

The same job,
minus the manual part

Switch between how the work ran before, and how it runs now.

  • Refreshing a government portal at six in the morning, for weeks
  • Openings appear without warning and are gone in minutes
  • Intermediaries charging €80 to €200 to watch a page that is free to look at
The build

How it was
put together

In the order it was built, and why each part exists.

  1. 01

    Watch a page you do not control

    The source is a public portal with no API, no schedule and no notification of its own. Everything downstream is built around that: a fixed check interval, rotation so no single session hammers it, and a check that can fail without the whole system stopping.

  2. 02

    One check, many subscribers

    Shared checks mean one request per procedure rather than one per customer. Twenty people watching the same office cost the same as one, which is what makes a €14.99 price possible at all.

  3. 03

    Alert, and then get out of the way

    The alert carries the office, the date and the time, by email and Telegram at once. The customer books it themselves - the product never holds or reserves anything on their behalf, and the site says so plainly.

  4. 04

    The console behind it

    Monitors, shared monitors, bookings, payments, coupons, reference data for provinces, offices and procedures, an audit log of every action, and a system health page that says whether the whole thing is actually running.

A ninety second window is the whole specification

The product page carries a real capture: five checks in a row report nothing, one reports four openings in Palma de Mallorca, and the next reports nothing again. That gap lasted 92 seconds.

Every decision follows from that number. A check interval measured in minutes would miss most of them. A notification that goes out for review first would arrive too late. A system that needs a person awake at six in the morning is the problem, not the fix.

Saying plainly what it does not do

The site has a section listing what the product deliberately does not do. It does not book on the customer's behalf, it does not promise an appointment, and it does not renew itself.

That section exists because the category is full of intermediaries who charge for the opposite impression. Refusing the overclaim in writing is the strongest thing on the page.

Front end and admin are one system

The public site sells and configures; the console runs and explains. A subscriber choosing a province and a procedure on the marketing site is creating a monitor in the same database an operator later sees in the audit log.

It is the only always on system in this portfolio, and the only one where being down for an hour is a refund rather than an inconvenience.

90s

Between checks, day and night

92s

The measured window a real opening stayed open

2

Alert channels, email and Telegram, both included

€14.99

One payment, no subscription, refunded if never alerted