Solera opens its doors.
After three years of building, nine industries of testing, and one premium villa that became our proving ground — the Solera Management Console launches in June. Here’s what’s in it, who it’s for, and what it costs.
Solera is the operating platform we’ve been building for the last three years — the calendar, customer records, reservations, deposits, and quiet operational machinery that small businesses run on. It comes in nine industry editions, ships under one flat monthly subscription, and takes zero commission on the bookings that flow through it. The Management Console opens in June 2026. The mobile companion, Solera Go, follows in August.
This is the post we wanted to write for a long time. The product is ready.
What Solera actually is
Solera is the software a small business runs itself on. It’s not a marketing site, it’s not a listings platform, it’s not a marketplace. It’s the back-of-house tool the operator opens at 8am to see today’s arrivals, the phone-app the receptionist uses to confirm a booking, and the dashboard the owner checks on a Tuesday evening to decide next month’s rates.
It does four things, and tries to do them very well.
That’s the whole product. We argued about each of those six categories for months. We refused to add a seventh.
Nine industry editions, one platform
Solera ships as nine industry-specific editions on launch day. Each edition shares the same backbone — calendar, customers, capacity, comms — but configures itself for the realities of its industry. A restaurant edition knows about table combinations. A clinic edition knows about treatment plans. An esports edition knows about gaming stations and tournament brackets.
We didn’t arrive at nine by accident. We arrived at nine by refusing to add a vertical until at least two interested operators existed in it. The full list at launch:
Each is a real edition, not a re-skinned demo. A restaurant operator and a dentist will have meaningfully different screens, different forms, different reports. They share the engine. They don’t share the chrome.
We wrote about why we did it this way at length in What nine industries taught us about building Solera. Short version: a flexible “configure anything” platform always feels like nothing in particular. We’d rather ship nine focused products that share a backbone.
Solera Go — the mobile companion (August)
The Console is the operator’s tool. Solera Go, launching August 2026, is the customer’s tool. It’s a clean mobile app that lets a guest book, message, check in, pay, and re-book without going through a third-party listings site. It runs on the same backbone as the Console, in real time. A booking made in Go lands in the operator’s calendar before the page reloads.
This is the part that takes commissions to zero. Every booking that comes through Go bypasses the OTA tax entirely. The operator pays Solera a flat monthly subscription. Nothing per booking, nothing per guest, nothing per channel.
What it costs
We’ll publish the exact numbers when the Console opens. They will be the same for an independent villa owner and for a five-location restaurant group, scaled by usage rather than by feature paywall. We don’t do up-sells. We don’t do tiers. The product you see at launch is the product you get.
Why we built it like this
The honest reason: we got tired of recommending other people’s products to clients who deserved better, and we got tired of watching small operators pay 18% to OTAs for the privilege of being found through channels they didn’t control. The villa rental that loses €600 in commission on every weekend booking. The restaurant that pays per-cover to its reservation provider. The clinic patching together three SaaS tools and an Excel sheet to run patient records.
Every one of those operators has a real business with real margin. They shouldn’t be paying their software a fifth of every transaction. They shouldn’t be tier-walled out of the features they need. They should be able to run the whole thing from a phone on a Tuesday evening.
Solera is the platform we wanted to recommend and couldn’t find. So we built it.
The platform that does this, and only this, well, has been the white whale of small-business software for fifteen years. The closest competitors are either huge enterprise tools (Mews, Cloudbeds) priced for hotels or industry-specialised verticals (Mindbody, OpenTable) that lock you into one shape of business. Solera sits in the gap — small enough to be friendly, broad enough to follow you if your business shifts shape.
What ships in June
Day one, you get:
- The Solera Management Console for one of the nine industry editions
- Calendar, reservations, customer records, rates, deposits, communication, weekly reporting
- Direct booking pages on your own domain (no “solera.com/yourbiz” vanity URLs)
- A migration assistant for moving your existing data in (CSV, calendar feeds, spreadsheet imports)
- Email and chat support from the SA-HR team during EU business hours
- Two complimentary onboarding sessions with someone on our team who knows your industry
What you don’t get on day one but’s coming: Solera Go (August), the agent integrations for Mente AI assistants (late 2026), and a handful of vertical-specific extras we’re still polishing for one or two of the editions.
How to be first in
Console access opens to the waitlist in June. We’re onboarding in batches by industry, with the Stays & Suites edition first — that’s the one we’ve been running on Villa Dolce Vita and a handful of other premium properties for over a year now. Other editions follow at roughly two-week intervals.
If you run a small business in any of the nine industries above, drop us a note. Tell us a little about what you’re running today, what’s broken, and what would make a difference for you. We’ll get you on the list and follow up when your edition opens.
This is the project that has occupied most of SA-HR’s focus for the last three years. It’s the platform the rest of the studio increasingly orbits — Mente’s AI agents will plug into it, Forge’s fabrication outputs will ship under it, and the Atlas edition we just folded in is the proof that the architecture stretches in directions we didn’t fully see when we started. Building it has been a privilege. Launching it — finally — is going to be a good month.
See you in June.