Why a Coworking Operator Built Its Own Software: The Case for Altitude, Our Member App, and When Building Beats Buying

Work Heights is a network of seven neighborhood coworking spaces in Brooklyn. We rent desks and offices. We are not a software company.

And yet, over the last couple of years, we've built a custom member app, a customer success platform called Altitude, a branded WiFi login system, and a handful of other internal tools. Our members use software we designed every single day.

This is why we did it, what we learned, and the one place I decided building was the wrong call.

It started with a single question

As we grew from one location to a network, members started asking a simple question: which space should I go to today?

Some people want a buzzing room. Some want a quiet corner. With seven locations to choose from, the most useful thing we could give them was a live count of how many members are on site at each space, visible before they leave the house.

No off-the-shelf coworking platform was going to build that for us. So we built it ourselves.

That live count is still one of the most valuable features we offer. It gives members control over when and where they work, and it spreads people across the network more naturally.

The app became the front door

Once we had our own app, it grew into the center of the member experience. Today it handles nearly everything a member does day to day:

• Booking meeting rooms

• Seeing live member counts at every location

• Opening our doors, through an entry system we built from the ground up

• Tracking booking credits and membership details

• Browsing our own events system

• Discovering local offers from neighborhood businesses, placed on a map

Our billing and membership platform is still our source of truth behind the scenes. Room bookings, for example, sync with it. But from the member's point of view, it all lives in one app that looks and feels like Work Heights. Most members never interact with the backend at all.

Altitude: the whole customer journey in one place

The tool I'm proudest of is one members never see.

Altitude is our custom customer success platform. For every member, it shows which locations they prefer, how often they move between spaces, when they were last in, and a full record of our communications with them.

It also runs our time-based customer journey automations, controlling when and how often we reach out by email and in-app message.

The real unlock was mapping churn risk signals. Altitude flags members who show early signs of leaving, and also surfaces upsell opportunities. Our team can schedule follow-ups, review all past outreach in one place, and keep a close eye on the health of every membership.

The result is that our community manager uses one tool, all day, to manage the entire customer journey. No more jumping between spreadsheets, inboxes, and dashboards.

Even the WiFi got a redesign

Captive portals, the login screens you see when joining a public network, are usually clunky. Most are built for use cases like paying for WiFi at an airport.

We wanted something different: two clear tracks. Members get a smooth, seamless login. Guests get their own equally simple path. Each group gets the right level of access, with custom messaging and a branded experience that makes it obvious how to get online.

It's a small moment in someone's day. But first impressions happen in small moments, and no off-the-shelf product could give us that.

Where building was the wrong call

Here's the honest part.

When I first started building our own software, I set out to replace our entire member management and billing platform with a system we called Base. I got very far into it.

Then I had a realization. Billing, credit tracking, and invoicing are the core of the business. If those break, everything breaks. Switching them on and hoping they worked wasn't a risk worth taking.

Our existing platform has years of experience and has been debugged extensively by a team focused on exactly that problem. Their build is far more robust than anything I could create on my own. So we retired Base, kept our backend, and built everything else on top of it.

I'm very glad we made that decision.

How a designer ended up shipping software

My background is fashion design, not engineering. User experience and interface design have always felt natural to me. The back end is where I used to get stuck.

AI coding tools changed that completely. Working with Claude Code, on a stack of Next.js, Supabase, and Vercel, I've been able to build full system flows that would not have been possible for me before. It feels like the last big unlock. Today, I genuinely believe we can build whatever the business needs.

My rule of thumb: build vs. buy

Here's how I think about it now:

Always look first. See whether someone has already built what you need.

Buy for the core. If it's a core business function like billing, payments, or anything where failure hurts customers, pay for proven software. Those companies have built years of safeguards around exactly that process.

Build for everything else. If it's ancillary, a smaller use case, or a nice-to-have, you can very likely build it yourself with AI. We've ended our contracts for those kinds of tools and replaced them with software that fits us better and that we own outright.

Build where it's your differentiator. The member experience is what makes Work Heights feel like Work Heights. That's worth owning.

The best time in history to build

I can't think of many barriers left, unless you're in a heavily regulated industry with a lot of government hoops to jump through. Barring that, there's almost nothing stopping you from building what you want, at any level.

So try something small. Maybe it grows.

That's exactly what happened with Work Heights.