SeatFinder

Overview

SeatFinder is a course enrollment tracking service designed to help university students secure spots in full classes. We actively monitor course and waitlist availability and notify our students the moment a seat becomes available.

We monitor seat availability across major universities in Canada: McGill, McMaster, and Concordia. Since launching in 2025, we’ve sent over 35,000 notifications across 2,300 tracking requests.

Architecture

The core challenge is monitoring thousands of courses simultaneously with minimal latency. Every tracked course is checked in parallel on each polling cycle — each check compares current availability against its cached state and triggers notifications the moment a seat opens up.

Running all checks concurrently keeps end-to-end latency low even as the number of tracked courses grows, so students are notified within seconds of a seat becoming available.

Stack: FastAPI, Celery, Redis, SQL