I grew up doing my homework at a kitchen table covered in invoice carbons. My dad ran a 4-truck HVAC shop in central Pennsylvania. He was a great technician, a fair boss, and an absolutely terrible bookkeeper — not because he was lazy, but because every piece of software available to him was either designed for a national franchise or for someone with a finance background.
The kitchen table
At 9pm, after dinner, after dispatching three callbacks, my dad would sit down with a stack of yellow carbons and an Excel spreadsheet and try to remember which jobs got billed, which deposits got paid, and which customers needed reminding. By the time I was in high school he had a "system" — a series of plastic file boxes, a wall calendar, and a dog-eared notebook — that worked because he held the whole thing in his head.
I spent four hours doing paperwork that two-truck shops in the cities probably do in twenty minutes. Why is that?
The stack we inherited
When I started looking at the SaaS market for trade businesses in 2024, I had two reactions:
- The big players (ServiceTitan, Housecall Pro, Jobber) all start at $200–$600 per user per month and require an implementation consultant. They are spectacular, but for a 5-truck shop they're a part-time office hire's worth of monthly spend.
- The cheap players are CRMs with a calendar bolted on. They let you store customers and quote line items but they punt on the hard stuff: dispatch, payments, two-way SMS, accounting sync.
Nobody was building the thing in the middle: a real, opinionated, all-in-one ops app for a 1- to 20-truck shop, priced for what a 1- to 20-truck shop can actually afford.
What changed
Three things, all in the last 24 months, made it suddenly possible:
- Vision-capable LLMs got cheap. A photo of a rusted-out water heater and a 30-second voice note can now produce an itemized quote in 8 seconds for less than the cost of a stamp. That used to be a $40 estimator's job.
- Stripe Connect matured. Onboarding a 5-truck shop to take cards and ACH used to take a week and a notarized form. It's now a 6-minute self-serve flow.
- Mobile-first finally won. Every owner and tech has a $700 computer in their pocket. The right native app means no laptop in the truck, ever.
What we actually built
TradeOS is the operations app I wish my dad had had. Quote a job from a photo, take a deposit on acceptance, dispatch from the truck, send a "tech is on the way" text, log materials and photos in the field, and have it all push to QuickBooks overnight. One opinionated workflow, designed for the way trade owners actually work — not the way office software thinks they should.
We're early, we're small, and we're shipping every week. If you run a shop, we'd love to hear from you — we're at hello@tradeos.app, and a founder will reply within a day.