THE THING WE BUILT:

Bandwidth

Being an agency for over a decade, we’ve tried a few capacity planning apps in our day. They all roughly do what they claim to do, but at what cost? Or more specifically, how many clicks?

Maybe it’s clicking through seventeen different dropdowns, toggle switches, and date pickers just to tell your planning software that Angela will work 32 hours on ProjectZ next month.

It’s death by a thousand clicks. A world of UIs that feels like filling out tax forms while wearing oven mitts.

Meanwhile, our project management meeting notes are way more conversational. “Angela will do 70 hours on ProjectZ, and then spread the rest of her time across other projects.”

It got us thinking. Why can’t I just paste that sentence somewhere and be done?

So we built a thing.

Bandwidth in action

How it works:

• Drop in your meeting notes, project updates, upcoming PTO, or random thoughts about who should work on what

• Bandwidth reads your natural language and determines realistic resource allocation

• Review a simple visual breakdown of hours, availability, and project assignments

• Make edits or copy the output to a simple text format

  
  

Things we learned and lessons applied:

1. Integration beats replacement Like I said, we’ve tried a lot of planning tools. They work, but they take a lot to maintain. And they pull us out of the meetings we already hold, and the notes we’re already taking. So we built something that works with how we already work. Meeting notes go in, resource plans come out. The rest of our process stays the same.

2. Skip the dropdown. Plan in plain English. Some of our first thoughts when building this were things like, “Hey, we probably need tagging. You know, click here to tag a project or person with ENG or DES.” But a sentence like “Samantha will focus on design work for ProjectY for 40 hours per month” contains the info already. And it’s the kind of thing we’re already writing in a Notion doc. An LLM can understand the context. No dropdowns. No extra work.

3. Weekly planning, monthly billing We plan hours weekly. Clients get billed monthly. It’s a small thing, but it adds friction to planning. Bandwidth bridges those two timelines automatically, turning weekly estimates into monthly totals. It saves us from constant mental math and keeps conversations with sales and project leads on track.

4. Built to plug into other LLMs We added a “Copy Output” feature that converts the table into plain text. It’s simple, but powerful—now you can drop that output straight into another LLM. The more we build, the more we want our tools to work together. This keeps that door open.

Built with ❤️ by Township

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