findabed.org

What It Is

Finding A Bed Tonight is a real-time bed availability platform for U.S. Continuums of Care, cities, and shelter networks. Its goal is to replace the late-night workflow where outreach workers call shelters one by one to confirm available beds. It is open source under the Apache 2.0 license, designed for self-hosted deployment, and emphasizes community ownership of data, no per-seat fees, and no vendor lock-in. The project text clearly states that it has a demo deployment with fictional data at findabed.org, but has not yet been adopted in production by any CoC community.

Core Features and Collaboration

The core workflow lets outreach workers search for beds on mobile by population type, constraints, location, and other criteria, then place a hold within three steps. Holds default to 90 minutes and are configurable. Shelter coordinators can update total bed counts and occupancy in about 30 seconds, while the system calculates availability in real time. Offline operation is also supported: when there is no network connection, hold actions are queued, automatically sent once connectivity returns, and conflict results are reported back. On the admin side, it includes shelters, users, roles, surge mode, HIC/PIT exports, CoC analytics, and an HMIS bridge. Roles include CoC Admin, Coordinator, Outreach, DV Coordinator, and DV Outreach, with DV access requiring separate authorization.

Pricing, Deployment, and Integrations

The software is free and permanently open source; the main cost is self-hosted infrastructure: Lite at $15-30/month, Standard at $30-75/month, and Full at $100+/month. Deployment can scale from PostgreSQL to Redis and Kafka, making it suitable for anything from small rural networks to metropolitan areas. For integrations, it supports asynchronous HMIS push, with Clarity, WellSky, and ClientTrack listed in the text. It can import from HSDS 3.0 or 211 CSV, supports OAuth2/SSO such as Microsoft 365, and can be operated with Grafana and distributed tracing.

Security, Compliance, and Limitations

The security design is fairly comprehensive: JWT, TOTP 2FA, authentication rate limiting, security headers, PostgreSQL Row Level Security, OWASP scans, ZAP baseline, and cross-tenant isolation validation. The DV workflow is a highlight: zero client PII, no address storage, referral tokens hard-deleted after 24 hours, and a stated design intended to support VAWA/FVPSA. However, these are not independent certifications. HUD exports are also only format-aligned and are not HUD-certified. In reentry mode, optional PII is encrypted and planned for deletion after 25 hours, but the text discloses that this SLA is not currently monitored.

Who It’s For and Access from China

It is suitable for U.S. CoCs, city governments, nonprofit shelter networks, and funders evaluating civic infrastructure. It is not a good fit for organizations that need a ready-to-buy product, an official SLA, or lack operational capacity. Access from China is not stated in the project text, so it should be considered unknown; payment information is also not disclosed. For similar scenarios in China, it would likely need to be reworked around local government assistance programs, civil affairs informatization, or low-code dispatch systems, especially given differences in compliance, maps, identity, and payment environments.