Guests
No service fee, no middleman
Guests browse, read, and send an inquiry that lands in the owner's inbox with the guest's real email on it. No payment window, no stripped-out phone numbers.
The anti-Airbnb for the Virgin Islands.
Virgin Islands Villas is a directory of owner-listed Virgin Islands vacation rentals across St. John, St. Thomas and the British Virgin Islands. Guests find a villa and write straight to its owner. No service fee, no payment window. Owners pay a flat fee a year.
01 / The product
Direct to the owner, on the owner's terms.
The local alternative to the platforms had been a few regional directories that look and work like 2009. The bet is that owners leave the platforms only if the direct-booking site is as good as the platforms.
Owners
A flat fee a year
Owners pay an annual listing fee in three tiers, priced by nightly rate. That is the entire business model. The site never takes the booking or holds the money.
Market
Airbnb-grade, without the fees
Roughly 4,200 whole-home rentals in the territory earn about $250M a year, almost all on Airbnb and Vrbo, where guests pay 14–16% on top and owners pay a commission underneath.
02 / The build
Airbnb-grade product, shipped solo.
Built with Claude Code starting September 2026 and launched the same month. Our founder owns and runs a villa on St. John, so he was the first customer, and his house is listed on the same terms as everyone else's.
- Search is a full-screen map on phones: clustered pins, live filters, and a result count that updates as you drag.
- Villa pages load hero images sized to the device, a live rate calendar, an availability check, and drive times to every beach from the front door.
- A custom design system with native dialogs and popovers and no component library. Largest contentful paint lands around three seconds on a 4G phone.
- Every public page is server-rendered for crawlers. Each template has a publish gate, and an audit script checks the rendered page before anything is indexed.
- A content layer the guidebooks cannot write: measured drive times from every neighborhood to each beach and the ferry, plus beach pages with today's conditions from the weather service and the territory's advisories.
- Hosts get a listing wizard, an onboarding call booked through Cal.com, and a short email drip until the listing is live. Guests get accounts with a trip planner.
- Admin is an exceptions queue. Calendar sync, conditions, search-console pulls and review refreshes run on a schedule, and a person only sees what needs a decision.
- Playwright runs against every Vercel preview on CI. Planning and research documents are versioned beside the code, with a house style guide and a claims register the copy is checked against.
0%
Guest service fee
340+
Merged pull requests, one builder
83guides
53 neighborhood guides · 30 beach guides, live
“Owners leave the platforms only if the direct-booking site is as good as the platforms. So the bar is Airbnb-grade product without Airbnb's fees.”
Nathan Holt
Founder, Single Fin · villa owner, St. John
03 / Stack & facts
What it runs on, and where to find it.
- Status
- Launched September 2026. St. Thomas and St. John live, BVI next.
- How it works
- Guest writes to the owner, they agree the details, the guest pays the owner. How Virgin Islands Villas works.
- For owners
- Three annual tiers priced by nightly rate. List a villa on Virgin Islands Villas.
- Content
- Island hubs, 53 neighborhood guides, 30 beach guides, ferry and airport logistics, where to eat, and webcams.
- Frontend
- Next.js 16 and React 19 on Vercel. Mapbox GL with a custom style.
- Backend
- Payload CMS as the system of record on Neon Postgres. Stripe for billing and referrals. Resend for email. PostHog for analytics.
- Process
- Shipped solo with Claude Code. Playwright against every Vercel preview on CI. Style guide and claims register versioned beside the code.
- Role
- Founder-built. Product, design, engineering and content, one seat.
04 / Work with us
Have a marketplace or a product to ship? Tell us about it.
This is what a 0→1 engagement looks like when we are both the builder and the first customer. Two-week trial, then a clear scope.