Holiday Optimizer — maximize your time off with strategic planning
Holiday Optimizer is a free, privacy-first web app that turns your annual leave into the longest possible stretches off. It analyzes public holidays and weekends and tells you exactly which days to book to maximize consecutive days away from work. It’s a live product at holiday-optimizer.com.
What it does
You enter how many leave days you have and pick your region; the optimizer finds the leave dates that chain together with public holidays and weekends — the “bridge days” — to produce the most total time off per day spent. Everything runs locally in your browser: no account needed, and no leave data ever leaves your device.
- Leave optimization — suggests the dates that maximize consecutive days off for the leave you have
- Multi-region public holidays — accurate holiday data for many countries and regions
- Visual calendar — see the resulting breaks at a glance, with an efficiency metric (days off gained per leave day used)
- Calendar export — export your plan as an
.icsfile (a paid feature, currently for U.S. customers) - Privacy-first — all calculations happen in-browser; preferences are stored in local storage
How it’s built
A serverless, hybrid architecture:
- Frontend — Next.js, React, TypeScript, and Tailwind CSS, deployed on Cloudflare Pages
- Optimization — runs entirely client-side using the bundled
date-holidayslibrary, so the holiday math never hits a server - Calendar export — an AWS Lambda generates the
.icsfile into a private, short-lived (48-hour) S3 bucket - Payments & email — Stripe Checkout for the paid export, Resend for delivering the download link
- Analytics — PostHog (privacy-focused, consent-based)
FAQ
How does it decide when I should take leave? It scans the year’s public holidays and weekends for your region and finds the leave dates that link them into the longest unbroken stretches off, then ranks the suggestions by efficiency — total days off per leave day spent.
Is my data private? Yes. All optimization runs locally in your browser; your leave days and preferences are never sent to a server.
What does it cost?
The optimizer is free to use. Exporting your plan as a calendar (.ics) file is a paid feature.
Which regions are supported? Public-holiday data is bundled for many countries and regions, selectable when you plan.
Why I built it
Most people leave consecutive days off on the table because lining leave up with public holidays by hand is tedious. I wanted to solve that real, recurring problem — and ship a complete product end to end: a client-side optimization algorithm, a serverless paid feature on AWS, payments, and privacy-first analytics.