Built by someone who's still playing.
Aatago isn't a startup idea. It's the app I needed as an active player who helps run his cricket club — built from every gap and headache I ran into, by someone who lives this sport.
The short version
Aatago is a one-person operation out of Edmonton, Alberta. Cricket is my passion — I play it and help run my club here, the real kind with whites that never stay white and grounds an hour out of town. And for years I lived the same slow-motion disaster every single week:
- A fixture gets posted in the group chat. Half the team never replies.
- Thursday night becomes a forensic investigation: who saw it, who's in, who's "maybe"?
- Saturday morning, two guys don't show, and the XI you picked on vibes falls apart.
- Then the selection argument starts — with no record of anything.
I tried the big team apps. They were built for someone else's sport, priced per team — three squads runs you ~$300 a year — stuffed with ads, and kept basic things like reminders and calendar sync behind paywalls. None of them understood what a cricket club actually argues about. So I built the thing I wanted: scheduling the whole team can see, RSVPs you can actually track, dues tracking that ends the treasurer-spreadsheet era, and an audit trail when selection gets spicy. No ads. No per-team fees. No paywalled basics. No billing traps.
Why cricket first
Cricket is the hardest team sport to organize. Eleven players, long days, far grounds, and selection politics that could fill a novel. If an app can run a cricket club smoothly, it can run anything — football, basketball, volleyball, you name it. So we started where the problem is worst, and we got the details right: practice matches, fielding sessions, transfers, locks.
Why one person
No investors, no growth-at-all-costs playbook, no ads on any tier. One person means every feature has to earn its place. Support is answered by the person who wrote the code — not a ticket queue that replies in five days with a link to a help article. And the pricing stays honest, with no auto-renewal surprises and no dark patterns — because there's no boardroom to impress, just clubs to serve.