Vendor & Agency Renewal Tracker: Never Get Caught by an Auto-Renew Again

The problem this kills

Marketing runs on a sprawl of contracts: the analytics tool, the email platform, the SEO retainer, the creative agency, the swag vendor, three different "AI" subscriptions someone expensed last quarter. Each one has a renewal date — and, buried in the fine print, a notice period: cancel or renegotiate at least 30, 60, or 90 days before that date, or it silently rolls over for another year at the new, higher price.

So what actually happens? You find out a contract auto-renewed when the invoice lands. The window to renegotiate closed weeks ago. The tool nobody uses anymore just locked you in for twelve more months. And the spreadsheet that was supposed to track all this is out of date because tracking renewal minus notice period by hand, across dozens of vendors, is exactly the kind of tedious, easy-to-forget work that falls through the cracks.

You don't need a fancy procurement system to fix this, and you don't need to be a developer. You need a small tool that does the date math for you, taps you on the shoulder in time, and forces a real decision before the deadline — and you can build it yourself this afternoon.

What you'll build

A private web app for your marketing team that:

• Imports your contracts from a CSV (or a quick manual entry form): vendor, service, annual/monthly cost, term, renewal date, notice period, owner, and optional contract file.
• Computes the deadline that actually matters — the notice-period deadline (renewal date minus the notice window), not just the renewal date — so you're alerted while you can still act.
• Flags what's coming up on a dashboard: a sorted "act now" list of contracts whose notice deadline is approaching.
• Emails the owner a reminder via Resend, well before the notice deadline, with the cost, the date, and the decision they need to make.
• Makes the owner decide on the record: renew, renegotiate, or cancel — with a short reason — through a human approval gate. Nothing is marked "handled" until a person signs off, and every decision is logged.
• Stores the signed contract file so the PDF is one click away when you're negotiating.
• Exports a clean, current contract list and a renewal calendar CSV any time.

What's inside the Implementation Plan

The plan is a complete, copy-paste runbook for an AI coding agent. You paste it into Claude Code and answer some questions; it builds the tool with you, step by step.

It opens by interviewing you about your business. This is the part that makes the tool yours instead of a generic template. Before writing any code, the agent asks how you track contracts today, what your CSV columns are actually called, how you record notice periods (days? months? "60 days before"?), who owns what, how far ahead you want to be warned, and the messy edge cases — month-to-month deals, multi-year terms, mid-term price hikes, contracts with no notice period at all. Then it reads back a short tailored spec, you give a thumbs-up, and it builds that.

You also get:

• A clear definition of done and a prerequisites checklist.
• The exact data model and validations, shaped by your interview answers.
• An architecture diagram so you understand what you're building.
• Every build step with a ready-to-paste prompt — login, import, deadline math, dashboard, Resend reminders, the approval gate, the decision log, and the exports.
• A verification checklist and a no-API fallback so you can build it today even with no integration to your existing systems.

The governance it includes (this is the point)

This isn't a shared spreadsheet — it's a controlled tool, and the controls are the whole reason it's trustworthy:

• Login so only your team can see and use it.
• Row-level security so each organization only ever sees its own contracts.
• A human-in-the-loop approval gate: the app surfaces the upcoming renewal and the recommended action, but a named owner must approve the renew / renegotiate / cancel decision before it's recorded as handled. The AI drafts and reminds; a person decides.
• A complete audit trail: who decided what, when, and why — every decision and its reasoning is logged and can't quietly disappear.
• Duplicate guards: a dedupe key of vendor + contract ID means the same contract can't get tracked twice, even if it's in your import file twice.

Who it's for

Marketing ops managers, agency/vendor coordinators, and anyone who owns a stack of marketing tool subscriptions and agency retainers and is tired of finding out about auto-renewals after the fact. If you can keep a spreadsheet of contracts, you can build and run this.

You've got this — paste the first prompt and let the agent interview you.