Ballast · a JAK Labs platform
Priced per shop.
Not per tech.
Job management, invoicing and books for a service business — quoting, scheduling, the crew app, and the money. The difference is the pricing model: the bill does not go up when you hire, so growing the crew stops being a software decision.
Running one shop today — mine · founding shops early 2027
It already runs a service business end to end. Mine.
I own a handyman company in Haslett, Michigan. I wrote this software to run it, and it has been running it for a year. These are that company’s numbers, out of its own system of record — not a customer’s, because Ballast has no customers yet. That is the whole reason there is a founding-shop list instead of a sign-up button.
$216K
invoiced through it · $610 more than 30 days late
253
jobs carried to complete, billed or paid
3,235
bank transactions categorised with nobody touching them
51
scheduled automations running · 18 of them move real money
Plus around 140 hours of admin off my own plate — that last one is my estimate, not a measurement, and it is the only figure here that is.
The arithmetic
What per-tech pricing costs you to grow
I am not going to tell you what anybody else charges — the big platforms don’t publish their pricing, so any number I put here would be made up. Use your own, off your own invoice. The arithmetic runs in your browser and nothing is sent anywhere.
Your number, off your own invoice. I’m not quoting anyone else’s price.
Enter the monthly amount you pay per technician for your current software.
Drag it up. Watch which bar moves.
Put your per-tech rate in and this will tell you what your next three hires cost you in software before anyone swings a hammer.
The difference
Where the two models part company
ballast · what keeps a vessel level as the load changes
Metered per head
Priced per tech, per month, forever. The bill goes up every time you hire, so growing the crew becomes a software decision.
Ballast
Priced per shop. Hire your fifth tech without phoning your software vendor.
Metered per head
Built for the general case, which means built for the shape most shops have. If yours is different you work around it for years.
Ballast
Built to run one real shop first, then shaped for the next one. The odd corners are the point, not the exception.
Metered per head
The software stops at the handoff to accounting. Support is a ticket queue.
Ballast
It carries on into the books, and you talk to the person who wrote it.
What it does
The parts that take your evenings
Email turns into a job
an enquiry lands and becomes a ticket without anyone opening it
Approve once, invoice itself
multi-rate crew billing, lead and helper rates
Every lead in one queue
website, email and marketplaces, spam filtered out
The books stay current
QuickBooks and bank sync, receipts read by camera
Crew app for the field
close-outs, photos and per-person hours from the truck
Money you are owed, on one screen
who owes what, and how late
Your data
Another shop cannot read your jobs
Shops share the platform, so the honest question is what stops one of them seeing another’s customers. The usual answer is “the code filters by account”, and that answer is one forgotten line from a leak.
Here every record is stored under a key that starts with your shop’s id, and the database credentials each request runs under are only permitted to read keys beginning with that id. So if I ever write a query that forgets to filter by shop, it does not quietly return someone else’s data — it is refused, and I get an error instead of you getting a breach.
Built that way from the first commit rather than added later, because the failure it prevents is the one you can never apologise your way out of. There is a test in the build that fails if a query goes out unscoped.
Where it actually is
The unflattering version
- —One shop runs on it: mine. A year in production, real money, real crew. One shop is not a track record across the trades and I am not going to pretend otherwise.
- —The multi-shop work is underway now. The software was written for one company and is being rebuilt to carry several. That is most of the work between here and a second shop.
- —Founding shops come on in early 2027. That date moves with the build, and I would rather tell you that now than miss it later. You will get a date I believe, not a date that sounds good.
- —The price is not set. It is per shop, not per tech — that part is decided. The number gets worked out with the first few shops rather than announced at them, and anyone in that group knows what it is before they commit to anything.
Be honest
When Ballast is the wrong answer
Four situations where you should not wait for this. I would rather say so here than after you have rearranged your business around a date.
You need it working next week
Then buy the subscription. Ballast takes founding shops in early 2027 and a demo on Monday beats a better tool in March. If the bleeding is happening now, stop the bleeding.
You want a support desk
There is one engineer here. No overnight rota, no phone number that reaches a stranger who can help at eleven on a Saturday. A big vendor gives you that and I cannot. It is a real thing to buy and a legitimate reason to buy it.
You run fifty techs across six locations
You are the other page. At that size owning the codebase outright beats renting it, and the economics stop arguing for a subscription.
See the acquisition option →Your operation is the standard shape
Calls in, jobs dispatched, work invoiced, no "except". If that describes you with no caveat, the off-the-shelf products were designed for exactly you and they are good software.
The honest comparison →A handful of founding shops, then it opens up.
I want shops whose work does not fit the standard mould, because those are the ones that make the software worth having. Tell me your trade, how many techs you run, what you use today and what it costs you. If Ballast is wrong for you I will say so in the reply — there is nothing to buy right now, so I have no reason not to.
Not ready to talk to anyone? Run the free website check instead — it takes a URL, needs no signup, and tells you what a customer on a phone runs into on your site. Or book the free 30-minute Operations Audit: half an hour on where your week actually goes, with no obligation and nothing to install.