We ran a self-storage facility and hated the software so much we built our own

Maker disclosure: I'm one of the people building StorageZen] — sharing this as background/context, not a pitch. Happy to answer questions either way.

Before this was a product, it was just us running a storage facility and losing hours every week to software that wasn't built for storage at all — generic property tools bent sideways to sort-of fit, or spreadsheets doing the job properly instead.

The breaking point was always the same three things:

- Owner payouts calculated by hand every single month, because nothing we used understood revenue-share arrangements between the facility and unit owners.

- Contracts as a separate, disconnected step — chase a signature, then go re-key the same details into the billing system.

- Compliance as an afterthought — bolted on at the end instead of built into how the data was structured from day one.

So we built StorageZen around the actual workflow of a storage facility instead of retrofitting something else: unit management, digital contracts and e-signatures, and automated billing and owner payouts in one system, not three.

The compliance angle mattered more than we expected once we started serving the UK market specifically — GDPR handled properly rather than assumed, e-signatures that actually hold up under UK law. That's covered in more detail in our GDPR compliance guide for storage operatorsif that's a live concern for anyone here.

If you're still running a facility on spreadsheets, we wrote up what that transition actually looks like (worth reading even if you never touch our product): Move Off Spreadsheets: A Guide.

Full platform overview is here, pricing (flat monthly fee, no per-unit games) is here.

Genuinely curious how other operators/founders in this space have handled the owner-payout problem specifically — that was the single ugliest spreadsheet in our old setup. Anyone solved it differently?