How I Built an AI Booking Chat for Salons with Next.js, Supabase and Groq

Most booking systems for salons look the same: pick a date, pick a time, pick a service, fill in your name, confirm. Five steps minimum. I wanted to build something different. What if customers could just type "Tomorrow 3pm haircut" and the system would understand it? The Problem I'm building term-in — a booking system for hair salons, beauty studios and barbershops in Germany. The DACH market (Germany, Austria, Switzerland) has around 80,000 salons, and the majority still rely on phone calls and paper calendars. The biggest pain points: Most booking attempts happen outside business hours — evenings, weekends, holidays No-show rates of 10-20% are common, costing salons thousands per month Salon owners want simple tools, not complex enterprise software The Stack Next.js with App Router and TypeScript Supabase (PostgreSQL) on EU servers for GDPR compliance Groq AI with Llama 3.3 70B for natural language understanding Twilio for SMS reminders Stripe for subscriptions Hetzner VPS + Cloudfl