Software guy here, cards on the table. Worked in various trades (construction, painting, plumbing) before that.
I’ve spent the last 10 years building work-order systems for service companies. Five of them, all internal tools paid by owners who wanted to digitize their operations. They’re still running in the field today, with over a million completed jobs between them.
Here’s what keeps bugging me. Every one of those projects got specced by someone in an office. The crew got the app handed to them after the fact. I was solving the dispatcher’s problem, not the the crew's. And I’m pretty sure that’s why Jobber and Housecall feel bloated and overpriced to most of the people in this sub — they’re built for 10-truck operations, sold to managers, and the field gets whatever’s left. Solo and 2-person crews end up paying monthly subscriptions for features they don’t use while the cheap/free tiers are deliberately gutted.
So this past winter I built ToolBerry. It’s my 6th field service app and the first one I am making free.
A few things I care about:
- Free forever. Not a trial. Not a teaser. If I add a paid tier for bigger teams later (crew sync, that kind of thing), the small-team version stays free.
- No signup, no credit card. Open the app, add a job, you’re ready to go.
- Works offline. Finish a basement job with no signal, sync when you’re back in the truck or at home.
- Your data is yours. Stays on your phone by default. No tracking, no resale. No lock in. You can export everything at any time.
It also works in English and Spanish. Most of the crews I built this for switch between the two on the same job and most software treats that like an afterthought.
Right now it does jobs, customers, and scheduling. Working on proposals, expenses, billing. Shipping them later this month.
What I’m hoping for from this post: I’m looking for 1, 2, and 3 person crews — landscapers, cleaners, pool guys, window guys, pressure washers, handymen — willing to either try it for a couple weeks and tell me what’s missing, or just drop a comment about what your current setup gets wrong about field reality. Even if you never download ToolBerry, your comment could help someone else who does.
Specifically, I want to know the gap between how office-built tools think a job goes and how it actually goes. The fields nobody fills in. The features that exist for the dispatcher but slow you down. The stuff the demo video never shows.
Roadmap is whatever this thread says hurts most.
There’s a small team behind it now, so support and the roadmap aren’t a one-person operation. If you want to go longer than a comment thread, feel free to DM me. No sales pitch on the other end.