I need a program that automatically creates a shift schedule. 1000$ budget

[Telok]

Anyone worth paying will probably ask at least three days worth of questions trying to nail down what you really need the software to do. Then someone good can probably put a rough alpha/beta in front of you two days later. After that you're probably out of money and you need at least two more test & rework cycles to get it where you'll actually use it without regrets.

I'm betting there's some already written thing out there that does 90% of what you want and within your price range. But finding it will be the hard part. You might try some game theory code. Although, thinking about it, I'm pretty sure someone could write a spreadsheet that would do it...

Actually, is there any reason a basic scheduling spreadsheet can't do it? First come first serve time off each shift, warnings when there aren't enough people available, auto-sums time on/off per employee into a field, you just have to manually eyeball the sums to see if the times offs sort of even out and talk to people if too many want the same days off.

Edit: here, quickie google search turns up a list of ten options https://peoplemanagingpeople.com/tools/best-free-employee-scheduling-software/