A 2019 spreadsheet that wouldn't quit.

Florida Planned started life as Disney_Meal_Planning.xlsx. A tab per trip. A sheet per day. Formulas for dining-plan credit budgets. Conditional formatting that turned cells coral when a booking window opened.

That spreadsheet has been the planning tool for the most recent of fourteen Florida trips since 1988. It started as five rows of restaurants I wanted to try. By the time it became Florida Planned, it had grown to dozens of tabs encoding things you can't easily look up: which Lightning Lane attractions are worth the early-start window, which signature restaurants are worth two credits, which days a jet-lagged family of four should anchor near the resort.

It worked. It worked specifically for the way my family planned trips. Spouse asks about Cinderella's Royal Table on Tuesday. I tab through. The spreadsheet has a row, a credit cost in dollars, a credit cost in DDP credits, a confidence score I made up in 2019.

The friend ask

Around the eighth trip, friends started asking. You've got a spreadsheet, right? Could we have a copy? Yes. Could you show me how it works?Yes, but it's three hours and you need to know which cells reference which.Could you just plan our trip with it?

That's the moment Florida Planned became something. The spreadsheet was a tool built for one person — me. To be useful to anyone else, it needed to become software. Software that didn't require knowing which tab held DDP credit costs. Software that handled the things UK first-timers stumble on: the 11am booking morning, the £/$ conversion, the choreography of multi-day shaping.

"The existing tools were American, expensive, and built for repeat visitors who knew what they were doing. UK first-timers needed something narrower, sharper, and aware that booking morning is at 11am on a Tuesday in May."

Software, not a service

Florida Planned doesn't book your restaurants. It doesn't replace the four-minute panic at 11am UK time — but it makes sure you walk into it with a priority list, a countdown, and a single screen that tells you what to click next.

It's also not a community. There's no comments section, no forum, no "share your trip" feature. The internet has enough Disney communities. What's missing is the operations tool the communities tell you to build yourself in Excel.

The £19 intro price (£25 at launch) per trip funds the catalogue updates and the time to build it. There's no enterprise tier. No freemium. No "free trial" gimmick. The economics are simple: a family of four spends £8,000+ on a WDW trip — £25 of operations tooling is rounding.

What's next

Friends-and-family testing in 2026, then a public launch shortly after. The catalogue is in active expansion — 76 restaurants today, target 80–150 by launch. Lightning Lane attractions, activity bookings, and editorial notes on every venue from someone who's actually eaten there. Florida Planned is a side project built solo from a 2019 spreadsheet — it ships when it ships.

If you'd like to be on the early list, sign in and we'll email you the day public bookings open. If you'd rather wait until launch, that's fine too. Either way, the spreadsheet won't get any quieter.