Getting Started With Dormefy

You get started with Dormefy by creating a dorm, adding rooms and seats, inviting your residents, and setting each person's default meal pattern. From that point the app counts meals, maintains the ledger, and writes the month-end bill as a by-product of normal operation.

What Dormefy is

Dormefy is a dormitory and mess meal management app for hostels, university halls, and self-managed messes. It replaces the spreadsheet-and-WhatsApp routine most messes run on: residents toggle their own meals from their phones, the manager and cook are notified instantly, and every meal, deposit, and expense lands in one running ledger that both sides can see.

The app runs on the web, iOS, and Android. The free plan covers one dorm with up to ten members, which is enough to run a real month before deciding whether to upgrade. Lifetime Solo ($29 one-time) removes the member cap for one dorm, and Lifetime Pro ($49 one-time) covers up to five dorms from a single dashboard.

Setting up your first dorm

Create the property first: name the dorm, add its rooms, and add the seats inside each room. Seats matter because rent and occupancy are tracked against them — a vacancy is visible the moment a seat has no resident assigned, rather than when someone asks whether a bed is free.

Next, invite your residents and assign each one to a seat. Set their monthly rent and their default meal pattern at the same time. The default pattern is what makes the automation work: Dormefy applies it every day without anyone re-adding people each morning, and residents only open the app when they are changing something.

Finally, set your meal cutoff time. After the cutoff, meals can no longer be toggled for that day, which means the shopping list is final when the cook needs it final. The details of how toggles, cutoffs, and daily totals interact are covered in the meal counter guide.

What runs automatically from here

Once residents are in, the daily loop needs no manager input. Meals are counted as residents confirm them, daily totals build in real time, deposits and expenses net against consumption in each person's running balance, and duty rotation tracks whose turn it is to shop or manage. Month-end becomes a review rather than a reconstruction — the itemised bill comes straight from the same ledger residents have been able to see all month.

Next steps

• Understand the automated meal counter
• Set up rent, deposits, and month-end billing