A shift schedule generator with no sign-up in front of it

This one. It computes in your browser, and there is nothing to sign up for: it asks for an email address, and that is all.

That is a design decision rather than a generous mood. Almost every free work schedule maker on the web is a trial with a grid attached: it wants an account before it shows you anything, or it shows you a schedule and then charges to let you take it away. Both are reasonable businesses and neither is what somebody typing 'free shift schedule maker' at nine on a Sunday evening is looking for.

So the arithmetic here happens on your machine, with no account and no charge. The rota is built in the browser as you type. If you close the tab it is gone; if you want it kept, ask for the CSV and it arrives in your inbox.

Each seat goes to whoever has worked least so far, among the people who can take it: not already working that day, not past the consecutive-days limit, not marked unavailable for that weekday, and not starting within ten hours of their last shift ending, so nobody walks off a night into the morning shift.

Deliberately, that is a simple algorithm, and the simplicity is the feature. A rotation you cannot predict is a rotation you cannot argue with, and the first thing anyone does with a generated rota is check whether it treated them fairly. Ties go to whoever has worked that particular shift least, then round the list in order, so over a fortnight everyone lands within a shift or so of everyone else, nights included, and you can verify that by counting, which is the only kind of fairness that survives contact with a break room.

Marking somebody unavailable is a colon after their name: 'Cara Whitfield: Thu', or 'Femi Okonkwo: weekends'. Those people stay in the rotation on every other day rather than being set aside, so the fairness count still includes them and you can see what their restriction cost the rest of the team. If a day is left with nobody who can take it, the generator leaves that seat empty and says so on the grid. Filling it anyway with somebody who told you they could not work would produce a rota that looks complete and is a lie, which is the one outcome worse than a gap.

What it does not do is optimise. There is no solver here weighing preferences against cost against seniority, because a solver whose reasoning you cannot follow produces a rota you have to defend in a meeting with the word 'algorithm', and that meeting goes badly. Generate a starting point, then edit it; the grid below is editable, and editing a good draft is a much smaller job than filling a blank one.

Rotate it rather than assign it. The generator balances each shift separately — the second shift schedule hands round the whole team instead of landing on whoever complained least — and the tally shows the count per person, per shift, so you can check.

Every team has a shift nobody wants: the 2nd shift that eats the evening, the night block, the weekend line. The unfair version of a rota is not usually unequal totals — it is equal totals made of unequal shifts, where two people both work seven and one of them worked seven evenings. A tally that only counts totals calls that fair, and the person carrying the evenings knows it is not.

So the generator counts both. When two people are otherwise tied for a slot, it goes to whoever has worked that particular shift least, which is what makes a second shift schedule rotate through everyone rather than settle on someone. And the tally under the grid shows the count per person for each shift — 1st, 2nd, 3rd, whatever you named them — because a fairness claim you cannot check by counting is a claim, not fairness. Totals stay within a shift of each other; the columns show nobody quietly owns the evening.

The same argument, ongoing and with real rules, is the product's equity view: nights, weekends, holidays and call-offs counted per person over months, on a screen the whole team can read, so the December meeting is a decision rather than an argument about memory.