Know which jobs are making money. Today, not at month-end.
Your crew logs time in thirty seconds. Costs land on the job the same morning. You see margin drift in week two — while there is still something you can do about it.
Five pilot spots. One job, one crew, one week to get running.
The job is finished. The margin is a mystery.
You bid the work carefully. Then the information you need to protect that bid arrives too late to use, in three different places, none of which talk to each other.
Hours sit on paper until Friday
Handwritten sheets, a group text, a foreman's memory. By the time they are keyed in, the week they describe is gone.
Costs land in the books weeks later
Invoices trickle in, the bookkeeper codes them when there is time, and the job cost report describes a version of the job that no longer exists.
By the time the number is right, the money is gone
The overrun you could have caught in week two shows up at closeout, next to a change order nobody wrote up and retainage nobody chased.
One loop, closed every morning.
Not a platform to administer. A single circuit that runs from the crew's phone to your margin, and pays the crew back for closing it.
The crew logs time against a cost code
Thirty seconds on a phone, in gloves, with no signal. Photos attach to the entry. Nobody fills out a timesheet on Friday.
Costs land on the job the same morning
Labour, materials, POs and change orders post against the budget you estimated from — not a month later, once the bookkeeper catches up.
You see margin while you can still change it
Hours-per-unit against estimate, per job, per crew. The job that is drifting shows up in week two, not at closeout.
Six things, done properly.
There is no document vault, no Gantt chart and no homeowner portal. You are a subcontractor — you do not need them, and you should not be paying for them.
Estimate to job budget
Build the estimate by cost code. It becomes the budget every number on the job reports against.
Field time capture
Offline-capable, under thirty seconds, allocated to the right cost code by the person doing the work.
Live cost vs. budget
Committed, actual and remaining on one screen — with labour productivity against what you bid.
Change orders from the field
Photograph it, price it, send it. The GC approves from a link with no login and no account.
Progress billing and retainage
AIA-style continuation sheets, percent complete, and a running retainage balance you can actually collect.
Two-way QuickBooks sync
Jobs, cost codes, POs, invoices and retainage move in both directions. Your books stay where your CPA wants them.
The whole market, with the prices in.
Two of the biggest names will not tell you what they cost until you sit through a demo. Here is the field as it actually stands, including ours.
| Product | Built for | What it costs | Users | Price published? |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| ChalklineThis is us | Specialty trade subs, $1M–$20M | $400/mo flat | Unlimited | On this page |
| Procore | Commercial GCs, $50M+ volume | $15K–$80K/yr, by construction volume · third-party estimate | Unlimited | Quote only |
| Buildertrend | Custom home builders, remodelers | $339–$1,099/mo — moved to volume quotes in 2026 · third-party estimate | Unlimited | Withdrawn 2026 |
| JobTread | Builders and remodelers | $199/mo + $20 per user | Per user | Yes |
| Knowify | Trade contractors | From $99/mo — configured price runs higher | Per user | Headline only |
| Contractor Foreman | Very small crews | $49–$332/mo by seat tier | Tiered | Yes |
| Fieldwire | Field crews — plans and punch lists | $39–$89/user/mo | Per user | Yes |
Compiled August 2026 from each vendor's own pricing page, except Procore and Buildertrend, which do not publish rates — those two are third-party estimates and are marked as such. Prices change; check before you decide, and tell us if we have any of this wrong and we will correct it.
Three gaps nobody is filling.
We did the market research before writing a line of code. These are the findings that made us build it — and they are all structural, which is why the incumbents cannot simply patch them.
Everything is built for the general contractor
Procore serves commercial GCs. Buildertrend and CoConstruct serve custom home builders. You are a sub — you don't own the schedule, you bid to a GC, and you make or lose money on labour against estimate, change-order recovery and retainage. None of those tools optimise for any of it.
Our answerBuilt for subs only. We will never ship a homeowner portal.
Volume pricing bills you for growing
Procore prices on annual construction volume. Buildertrend withdrew published pricing in 2026 and moved to eleven volume brackets. A good year moves you up a bracket and the bill arrives without a single new feature attached to it.
Our answer$400 flat, published above. Grow all you like — the price does not move.
Per-seat pricing keeps the crew off the software
At $39–$89 per user per month you ration logins, so the field never gets on it, so the office re-keys everything, so the data is a week old. Field adoption is not a training problem — it is a pricing problem wearing a training problem's coat.
Our answerUnlimited users on every plan, because the crew is the point.
Built for subs, not for builders.
Most construction software is designed for general contractors and custom home builders. You have been paying for someone else's workflow.
One price. Published. It does not go up because you grew.
No volume brackets, no per-seat maths, no quote form standing between you and the number. Put the whole crew on it — that is the only way this works.
Billed monthly. Cancel any time.
- ✓Unlimited users — office and field
- ✓Unlimited jobs and cost codes
- ✓Two-way QuickBooks Online sync
- ✓Change-order approval links for your GCs
- ✓Progress billing and retainage tracking
- ✓Full CSV export, on demand, from settings
Then $400. The rate is locked whatever we launch at.
- ✓We import your cost codes and one live job
- ✓Weekly call with the people building it
- ✓Crew-adoption reporting every Friday
- ✓Your roadmap requests go first
- ✓Walk away in month one and we refund it
Five contractors. One live job each.
We are looking for specialty trade subcontractors doing $1M–$20M who already know roughly which jobs hurt and want to stop finding out late. It is a paid pilot on purpose — we would rather have five customers than five hundred sign-ups.
- 01A twenty-minute call. You walk us through your last finished job and when you knew what it made.
- 02We set up one job. Your cost codes, one active project, one crew's phones. Nothing else changes.
- 03Four weeks, measured. If your crew is not logging their own time by week four, we have not earned it — and you get the month back.
The ones worth asking first.
Do I have to move my accounting?
No — and we would talk you out of it. Chalkline is not an accounting system. QuickBooks Online stays your book of record and we sync both ways with it. Your CPA never has to learn anything new.
Why is it built for subcontractors specifically?
Because the economics are different. A sub does not own the schedule, bids to a general contractor, and makes or loses money on labour productivity against estimate, change-order recovery and retainage. Tools built for GCs and custom home builders optimise for none of that.
What if my crews will not use it?
That is the right question, and it is the one most of these rollouts fail on — the field does the data entry and the office gets the benefit. Every field screen here has to pay the crew back in the same session: faster approvals, no Friday paperwork, fewer calls from the office. During the pilot we measure the share of crew-days logged by the crew rather than re-keyed by your office manager, and we show you the number every week.
How long does it take to get running?
One job, one crew, one week. We import your cost code structure and one active job, put the app on one crew's phones, and leave everything else alone until you have seen it work.
Can I get my data out?
Full export of every job, cost and entry as CSV, any time, from a button in settings. No support ticket and no exit interview.