My part of Roosthaven wrapped up this month. I started in December 2024, and for five months I was the only developer on it. I did the front end, the APIs, the database, the AI logic and the AWS setup.
Roosthaven is a real-estate platform. Buyers, sellers and agents work in one place, with tours, documents and offers together, so nobody has to jump between separate apps. It also has an AI co-pilot called Roost. Roost reads the papers of a deal, like disclosures, contracts, inspection reports and offers, and explains them in plain English.
When you build alone, the question every week is where your hours should go. These are the choices I made.
The first UI came from v0
I generated the first version of the interface with v0. That gave me working screens in days. After that I reworked the screens by hand until the interface was ready for production.
For a solo project I think this was the right trade. I did not spend my first weeks on buttons and layouts, and I still ended up with a UI that I understand fully because I went through all of it myself.
A database I don’t have to look after
The data sits in NeonDB, which is serverless Postgres. There is no database server for me to manage, and it scales down to zero when there is no traffic.
I wanted Postgres, and I did not want to be the person who patches and watches a database machine while also building everything else. Neon let me have the first without the second.
Roost reads the deal, not the internet
The AI features sit behind the API. Before Roost answers, the backend gives it the platform’s own data for that deal: the listing, the tour activity, the offers, and the documents people have uploaded.
This was the part I cared about most. A person who is about to buy a house does not need a model’s general opinion about houses. They need to know what this disclosure says, or how these two offers differ. So Roost compares offers and listings side by side and spells out the trade-offs, and it does that from the deal’s own material.
Deploys without a checklist
The platform runs on AWS and deploys through a CI/CD pipeline from GitHub. I push, and the pipeline does the release. When there is only one person, there is nobody to hand a release checklist to, so I did not want any manual steps.
The platform is live at roosthaven.com.