Dopastep: Using Realtime presence for focus room occupancy

Dopastep — https://dopastep.com — a focus app where you work through a task alongside other people in a live room.

Built solo on Next.js with @supabase/supabase-js 2.110.1.

The product is body doubling: you break a task you've been avoiding into small steps, then join a live focus room and work in synced focus/break cycles with whoever else is in it. No camera, no chat, no booking.

Where Supabase carries the load:

• Presence in rooms. The thing that makes body doubling work is knowing someone else is actually there, so occupancy has to be honest and near-instant — including people closing a tab without a clean exit. Realtime presence handles that, and the rule I settled on is that the room shows real occupancy even when it's zero, rather than padding the number.
• Public-read, auth-to-join. Row-level security lets rooms and their schedules be readable without a session while seat-taking requires one. That "you can look around before you commit" property turned out to matter a lot for a product whose users are, by definition, avoiding commitment.

Launched July 2026, still early. Happy to answer anything about the presence setup.