I read the reviews of the big construction platforms — the names you know. And every one of them starts from the same assumption: that every company needs everything. Project controls, document management, BIM coordination, integrations to systems you don’t run, dashboards for departments you don’t have.
Then there’s the price of everything. Serious money — the kind that only makes sense as a percentage of serious revenue. Multi-year commitments. And my favorite part: for most of them, you have to book a sales call just to find out what it costs. If the price were good news, it would be on the website.
No company my size is spending two percent of revenue on software. That’s not stubbornness; it’s arithmetic.
Who it’s actually for
I don’t begrudge the big platforms. If you’re a general contractor with an IT department, a back office full of project engineers, and a hundred million a year moving through the books, that software was built for you, priced for you, and it probably earns its keep.
But that’s not the trade I live in. The bulk of this industry is companies like mine and smaller — a handful of crews, an owner who still knows every man’s name, no IT department, no software budget line at all. A friend of mine manages documentation for an erector about my size. He recently priced one of these platforms: thousands a year, multi-year commitment, custom setup extra. There is no version of that company where the expense gets approved. We compared notes and it turns out we’re all of the same mind, all looking for the same thing, and none of us are the customer these vendors have in mind.
So the actual choice for a company our size has been: paper and spreadsheets, or the enterprise monster. Nothing in between.
The in-between
That gap is exactly where I built. CrewKeeper does the daily record of a jobsite — timesheets with real on-site arrival and departure, equipment inspections, safety meetings, audits, issues — recorded at the moment things happen, by the people they happen to. YEStimator does the takeoff and turns it into a finished proposal before you leave the site.
No modules you don’t need. No implementation project. No sales call — the prices are sitting right on the App Store page, where you’d expect. CrewKeeper is free for a one-man operation, and team plans start at $24.99 a month. Cancel whenever you like; your data is in your own iCloud, not on my servers — I don’t have servers.
I didn’t build it to compete with the platforms. I built it because I run a company the platforms weren’t built for, and I got tired of the choice being all-or-nothing. If you run one too, you know exactly the gap I’m talking about — you’ve been working in it your whole career.
— Dean Davids, Tailgate Technology