Rostera

Self-hosted staff shift scheduler — a weekly rota, exact hours, double-booking caught.

The problem it solves

Cafés, shops, clinics, and small ops teams build the weekly rota in a spreadsheet or a group chat — and every week it goes wrong the same ways: two people booked for the same shift, someone quietly pushed past their hours, an overnight shift counted wrong, and no clean copy to hand the team. Scheduling SaaS fixes it but charges per employee every month, and usually tries to bolt on payroll and a time clock you didn't ask for.

• Double-bookings and gaps nobody spots until the shift
• Weekly hours that don't add up, and overnight shifts counted wrong
• Per-seat monthly SaaS, bundled with payroll/time-clock you don't want

Every feature

• Publishing a rota can tell the staff. Publish a week and each employee with an address gets their own shifts — just theirs — through your own SMTP. Off by default; an invalid address is stored blank rather than wrong.
• Rota feeds calendars subscribe to. Per-employee and whole-roster token-guarded .ics feeds: staff subscribe once and published shifts appear in their own calendar. Revoke a token and that feed goes dark.
• Weekly rota grid. Staff down the side, the seven days of the chosen week across the top; navigate week to week with a configurable week-start day.
• Assigned or open shifts. Each shift has a date, start/end time, role or location, and a draft/published status — assigned to a person or left open for anyone to pick up. Shifts that cross midnight are handled correctly.
• Exact weekly hours. Times are stored as integer minutes, never floats, so each person's weekly total is exact to the minute, shown against an optional weekly-hours target.
• Double-booking detection. An overlapping shift for the same person is blocked; clean back-to-back hand-overs are allowed; correct even for overnight shifts that spill into the next day.
• DST-safe shift lengths. A shift on a spring-forward or fall-back day counts the true elapsed time — a lost hour in spring, a gained hour in autumn.
• Publish, PDF & hardened CSV. Publish a week (or one shift) in a click, print a dependency-free PDF of the rota grouped by person, and export a spreadsheet-formula-injection-hardened CSV; plus an hours report over any date range.
• Installable mobile app (PWA). Add it to a phone or tablet home screen straight from the browser — a full-screen app served from your own server, with no app store involved. Business data is not stored offline on the device; what you see is read live.
• My rota for every person. Each person can have their own login: their published shifts on their phone, nothing else. You see exactly what they see.
• Open shifts, asked for. Publish an open shift; staff ask to take it; you approve. Approval re-checks double-booking and time off.
• Swaps without the group chat. Staff offer a shift, a colleague picks it up, you decide once.
• Time off that sticks. Staff ask, you approve, and nobody can put them on a shift on those days: by hand, by drag, by copying last week, through the API, an import or an AI tool.
• When they can work. Each person marks their days and hours; the rota shows it and "who's free" lists them last when a shift falls outside it.
• Save a week, reuse it. Save any week as a template and apply it to another as drafts; double-bookings, leavers and time off are skipped.
• An hours budget for the week. See scheduled hours against your weekly budget as you build the rota. Hours only, never money.
• Clocked vs rostered, with Clockora. Connect Clockora and the Hours report shows each person's clocked hours beside their rota.
• Lock availability while you plan. Staff see theirs; changes wait for you.
• A changed shift reaches the person on it. When a published shift moves or goes to someone new, the person on it sees it marked on My rota. With staff emails on, everyone it touches gets one email saying what changed, including someone whose shift was deleted or given away.
• Hours on every shift. Each shift on the rota shows its length beside its times, readable on a phone.
• UK dates by default. New installs show dates the UK way (26 Sep 2026, 14:05); switch to the US style in Settings if you prefer.
• Updates from inside the app. The Updates page installs a new release with your license key: Ownware's signature is checked, a backup is taken first, and the app puts the previous version back by itself if the update is interrupted or the database step or start-up check of the new version fails. It never checks by itself.
• Backups by themselves. Automatic backups, an optional copy to S3-compatible storage you own, and a weekly check that the latest backup reads back. The Health page names anything that needs attention.
• Switch from Deputy. Upload Deputy's team member export and schedule export. A switch report checks every row with Rostera's own rules before one Import button brings them across, and importing the same file again adds nothing.
• Shift texts to your staff. Through your own SMS gateway, for staff who ask on their own My rota page: a text when their shifts are published or change, and, if they choose, when open shifts are up for grabs. Every text has a stop link.
• Own It 4.0.1 — fixes and an up-to-date manual. For Rostera, 4.0.1 fixes an installer and its sign-in, two-factor, invite and not-allowed pages that had lost their styling, a rollback that a page opened during an update could stop and a command-line update that ended in an error after putting the previous version back. Its manual, FAQ and QUICKSTART now cover everything 4.0 added, including two Nginx rules that keep the data folder private. Your license covers it: press Check for updates on the Updates page, or download it from your order page.
• Own It 4.0.2 — the installer opens on every host. For Rostera, 4.0.2 fixes a fresh install on an Apache host: the one-page setup at /install/ looped back to itself and never opened, and now it opens. Your license covers it: press Check for updates on the Updates page, or download it from your order page.

Release notes in full

• Own It 4.1: shift texts to your staff. For Rostera, 4.1 adds shift texts to staff who ask for them, through your own SMS gateway. An Extended license bought from October 4, 2026 covers up to ten client installations, one per client project: hand each one over to the client or host it for them, with the client's logo and colors from the app's branding settings. The API reference now shows how to connect Rostera to Zapier, Make or n8n, using its own webhooks and API key. Your license covers the update: press Check for updates on the Updates page, or download it from your order page.
• Own It 4.0: it updates and backs itself up. For Rostera, 4.0 means updates from inside the app: the Updates page checks for a new release with your license key, verifies Ownware's signature, takes a backup and puts the previous version back by itself if the update is interrupted or the database step or start-up check of the new version fails. A new install can start with a sample business and remove it in one click; backups run by themselves, with an optional offsite copy and a weekly check that the latest one reads back; and the Health page says whether the install is looking after itself. It also switches you over from Deputy: the team and the schedule.
• Own It 3.3: a changed shift reaches the person on it. 3.3 makes a change to the rota reach the person it affects. When a published shift moves or goes to someone new, it is marked on their My rota and, with staff emails on, everyone it touches gets one email saying what changed. Each shift also shows its hours beside its times, and new installs show dates the UK way.
• Own It 3.2: the rota in every person's hands. 3.2 put the rota in each person's hands. With their own My rota login, staff see their published shifts on their phone, ask to take an open shift, offer a swap, ask for time off and mark when they can work, and every decision stays with you. For you it added week templates, an hours budget for the week, an availability lock while you plan and, with Clockora connected, clocked hours beside the rota.
• Own It 3.1: it writes to the people you serve. The 3.1 wave gave the catalog a way to reach the other side of the transaction: counterparty email through your own SMTP server, calendar feeds your own calendar subscribes to, attachments filed where the paperwork belongs, and export presets other people's software imports. Each outbound feature ships switched off and runs on your own credentials; a failed send is recorded, and the action that triggered it stands. What this app gained is listed at the top of this section.
• Own It 3.0: works for your AI, not just for you. Shift swaps run offer, accept, decide once — approval re-checks the overlap rule for whoever takes the shift at the moment it is granted, so a swap can never create a double-booking. Over MCP, assigning a shift hits the same guard and refuses a conflict by name. The weekly roster PDF is the print-and-pin artifact.
• Own It 2.0: API, 2FA, backups, dark mode. Rostera 2.0 adds the 2.0 owner layer. Upgrade by replacing the files — the database migrates itself, and it is still the same one-time purchase.