Desk and room booking for offices of ten to a hundred people.
A timetable you can read across in one glance, and book by dragging on. It runs the week your office actually has, tells you who will be in on Tuesday, and counts a desk nobody turned up to as empty.
Two people cannot book the same desk
Not because the screen refuses it, but because the database does. A range exclusion constraint sits over resource, date and time, so two people pressing Book in the same instant cannot both win. Most tools check whether a slot is free and then write it, which leaves a gap between the two statements exactly wide enough for the 08:59 rush on a Monday.
A desk nobody came to is not a desk in use
Switch on check-in for a desk or a room and the booking has to be confirmed on the day. Miss the grace period and the slot reads as free again and anybody may take it. The abandoned booking stays on the record, because that is the evidence a desk was blocked and wasted, and it is the number that decides whether you renew the floor.
Every tool that measures bookings and calls the result occupancy reports an office as full on precisely the days it was empty.
Who is in on Tuesday
Nobody travels an hour to sit at a particular desk. They travel to be in the same room as three specific colleagues, and every desk tool answers the wrong half of that: it will tell you a desk is free and not tell you whether anyone you work with will be there.
Alcove shows the week by people. Names, per day, including the ones who only booked a meeting room. It is the question your office is already asking each other in Slack every Monday.
What it does not do
Alcove books desks and rooms. It is not a workplace platform, and these are not on the roadmap:
- Visitor sign-in and badge printing
- Lockers, parking bays and equipment
- Room display panels on the wall
- Cleaning and maintenance ticketing
- Headcount forecasting and space planning
If you need those, you want an estates system and you will pay estates-system money for it.
Price
$3 USD per person, per month.
Everyone in the organisation counts as a seat, whether they book anything or not. There is no annual commitment, no setup fee and no tier that unlocks the calendar feed. The 14-day trial needs no card, and when it ends only new bookings stop, so nothing you have already booked disappears while you decide.
Prices are in USD. Billing runs through Paddle, who handle VAT and sales tax as the merchant of record and will show you the total in your own currency at checkout.
Getting a whole office in
Claim your mail domain and anybody who signs up with a work address is already a member, with nobody to invite and nobody to chase. For the contractor on a personal address there is a reusable link for the handbook, and for one person at a time there is an invite that works only for the address it was sent to. Sign-in is by Google, or by email and a password.
Bookings can be subscribed to as a calendar feed, so a desk turns up beside the rest of somebody’s day rather than in a tab they forget to open.
One detail, since it costs you nothing and matters to somebody in most offices: free, booked and closed are told apart by fill, a hairline and a word rather than by colour, so the board is readable to the roughly one man in twelve who cannot read a red-and-green grid, and survives being photocopied or projected.