Most archery software is built by people who have never coached a thirteen-year-old through a bad outdoor day.
ArcherSource is being built by someone who has. The story below is short because the company is. There is one founder, one pilot team, and a small list of things we will not do with your data no matter what the market does next year.
Seven spreadsheets, and a kid who quit at eleven.
Rob Gilbert started coaching a youth archery program in Sarasota and within a year was running it out of seven different Google Sheets. One for the roster, one for parent contact info, one for classification progress, one for attendance, one for tournament signups, one for pin certificates, and one labeled "scratch" that nobody fully understood by month three. The tabs got renamed. Columns drifted. Two parents had the same kid's name spelled differently and got different reminder emails.
The sheets were the easy problem. The harder one was a kid we will call M. He was eleven. He came in keen and quit a year later with chronic shoulder pain because his first lessons taught him to muscle the bow open instead of using his back. By the time a coach who knew better saw him shoot, the pattern was wired in. The fix was eight months of unlearning that an eleven-year-old did not have the patience for.
That kid is the reason this product is form-first. The scoring engine is the easy part. The hard part is making sure a coach sees a problem in week two of a new archer, not week forty, and that a parent has enough visibility to ask the right question at the dinner table on Tuesday. ArcherSource exists because the gap between "we have a score" and "we have a kid who is going to keep shooting" is wider than the existing tools admit.
The product accepts losing money on small teams on purpose. Most US youth archery programs are run by a volunteer coach with a budget of zero. Charging them anything is the wrong shape of business. If you grow past five archers we want money; below that, we want you here.
Four things, in descending order of how often they get tested.
- 01
The roster is the most sensitive table in the database.
Scores are numbers. The roster is children. Every other decision in the product gets weighed against what it does to the people on that list, and that is why row-level security is the security boundary instead of "we'll hide the button in React." Hiding a button in React is not security. Anyone who has ever opened a browser's dev tools knows this, and a coach trusting us with their team's information deserves better than that.
In practice this means every table that holds personal information has a Postgres policy attached the same day it gets created, and the policies are written from the parent's side first: assume someone has the table name and a valid login. What can they do? If the answer is anything that surprises a parent, the policy is wrong.
- 02
Form is the lever; everything else is a number.
A scoring app that just records arrows ends up being a fancier spreadsheet. The point of recording arrows is that a coach can see a slump three weeks before the archer can articulate it, and intervene before the bad pattern hardens. Classifications and pins are real and worth tracking, but they are the scoreboard, not the game.
- 03
A free tier is not a trial.
If a team of five never grows past five, that team is welcome here for as long as the company exists. The math works because the teams that grow past five tend to keep growing, and a larger team that already runs its program on ArcherSource is worth more than five small teams squeezed for $5 a month.
- 04
Coaching content should not be locked behind a paywall the parents can't afford.
Half of ArcherSource is a public media site for a reason. The learning library, equipment write-ups, and tournament directory sit outside the app login because the kid in Topeka whose club shut down should still be able to read about a Vegas round and find an event in three states over.
The lines we are not going to cross.
Most of these are enforced in the database, not just in the product copy. If you ever catch us breaking one, write to hello@archersource.com and the founder will read it.
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We don't sell archer or parent data.
There is no analytics-broker line item in our P&L, and there isn't going to be. The business model is paid team subscriptions. If that ever changes, this page changes first.
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We don't run free-trial-to-credit-card-on-file traps.
You can use ArcherSource with one coach and five archers without ever entering a card, and that is not going to expire on a Tuesday at midnight. We earn money when teams grow, not when they forget.
-
We don't let minors send 1:1 DMs to other minors.
That rule lives in the Postgres row-level security layer, not just in the UI. The button is gone and the query would be rejected if you tried to call it directly.
-
We don't display a photo of an archer without per-archer parent consent.
Photo consent is a flag on the user row that a parent controls. Anywhere the app would render a photo, it checks the flag first. The default is off.
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We don't ship features that need a sales call to understand.
If the explanation has more than three sentences, the feature is wrong. We have already cut things for failing this rule and will cut more.
One coach. Five archers. No card. Not a trial.
You sign up at app.archersource.com, you do not enter a credit card, and you can run a five-archer team on practice scoring, the round catalog, classifications, pins, the roster, and the leaderboard for as long as the company stays standing.
Why does that work? Because youth archery programs in the US are mostly volunteer-coached and budget-strapped, and a team that hits the free cap is usually a team that just figured out archery is worth pursuing. We would rather earn money the year you grow to fifteen archers than scrape $5 a month off the program that is still deciding whether to keep running.
If you outgrow five archers, the paid plans start at $20 a month for up to 25, billed monthly, cancellable in two clicks. Full breakdown lives on the pricing page.
Sarasota, Florida. Pre-launch. One pilot team.
ArcherSource was started in 2025 and is being built through 2026 out of Sarasota, Florida. The pilot team is Sarasota Archery Academy, which is the youth program the founder coaches and the original reason the spreadsheets had to go.
Public launch is the second half of 2026. Until then, the media side of the site is live and updating, the team app is in private use with the pilot, and signup at app.archersource.com is open to other teams who want to try it early and tell us what is broken.
Write to a human at hello@archersource.com.
That is the founder's inbox at the moment, so the reply may take a day, and on tournament weekends sometimes two. If you are a coach with a question about a feature, a parent with a question about consent, or a reporter with a question about the product, the same address works for all three.