Why I Built This

The real, real, real reason I built this is because my wife and I just welcomed twins and we have three kids under three. This is my attempt at generating some suplemental income to afford Massachusetts priced daycare. Beyond that, I built this was to solve the ski trip planning pain point. We are 20-plus days per season on snow kind of people who primarily ski the Northeast and take a week trip out west.

Every ski trip I've planned started the same way: five browser tabs and an indecisive group chat. Snow report on OnTheSnow. Crowd check by googling each state's school vacation. Ikon app to triple check blackout dates — and whether there were new hoops this year. Flights on Google. Lodging on Airbnb. I was basically doing the "best value" calculus in my head.

The calculus is usually wrong or I missed something during planning. I showed up to an isolated mountain in Vermont without groceries, not knowing the closest real grocery store was forty minutes away and the on-mountain general store charged convenience-store prices. I rented a car at a western resort before learning that a free shuttle network had been running between town and the mountain for years. And I've lost count of how many times Epic or Ikon quietly added a new micro-rule — parking fees, carpool requirements, advance reservation windows — that I only found out about when I arrived at the resort.

I'm hoping to build something personalized for different people's needs. Mainly I had the group organizer hero in mind: the person who rallies friends for every trip, handles all the logistics, and is already doing too much. This takes some of that load off.

No Work Fridays combines snow conditions, crowd forecasts, flight/drive logistics, lodging, pass eligibility and some of my own opinions into a single ranked "best value" for that resort for those dates.

This is an early version — real data is still being wired in, the ranking model will get sharper over time, and I'll expand to more regions beyond the Northeast. If you have feedback, especially if something is wrong or missing for a resort you know well, I'd genuinely like to hear it.