Stop renting the software
that runs your shop.
You own your trucks, your tools, and your van stock. The system that quotes the work and dispatches the crew is the one thing you rent. We build electrical contractors one system for quoting, dispatch, permits, and the price book, and the code is yours when it ships.
- 2.5 yr
- Break-even, worked example
- 100%
- Source and IP yours
- 15 min
- Your migration effort
- $0
- Monthly licence fees
Renting was the cheap option. It stopped being one.
Subscription software made sense when a custom build cost ten times what it costs now. That flipped. In 2026 a generic tool that fits nobody is both worse than a custom one and, over the life of your business, more expensive.
Worked example
- $12,000 a year in subscriptions is $120,000 over ten years, or about $151,000 once you allow for the 5% annual increases everyone gets.
- A $30,000 build is a one-time $30,000 over the same ten years.
- Break-even lands in year 2.5. By year ten you are $90,000 to $121,000 ahead, and the asset is on your books instead of someone else's.
Those are round numbers. Put your own in and see where your shop lands: the SaaS cost calculator.
None of it was built for a BC electrical shop.
A contractor in the Lower Mainland runs two permitting regimes at once. Technical Safety BC handles electrical permits and inspections across most of the province, and several municipalities run their own. Your office manager knows which job belongs to which authority. Your software has no idea the distinction exists.
Your licence hangs off a Field Safety Representative, so declarations, permit closures, and the inspection record all have to be findable by one person on short notice. Apprentice ratios constrain who can be sent where. And if you run a service division alongside construction work, those two halves of the business keep different calendars, different billing, and different paperwork.
So the subscription covers most of a day and the rest lands in a spreadsheet nobody wants to own. You are paying full price for partial coverage, then paying again in staff time to patch the gap.
What you are probably running today.
01
ServiceTitan
Priced and shaped for large residential service operations. BC permitting authorities and safety-representative records are not in the data model, so they end up in a notes field.
02
Jobber
Good at residential scheduling and invoicing. Thin the moment a job has a permit, an inspection, a holdback, or a construction division attached to it.
03
The spreadsheet
Whatever the subscription does not cover. Usually the price book, the permit log, and the numbers the owner actually trusts.
Six things an electrical shop actually needs in one place.
01
Quoting off your real price book
Describe the job, and the quote comes back line-itemized against your own items and your own labour rate. New items get classified automatically instead of hunted down by hand. Turnaround goes from hours to minutes.
02
Dispatch sized to your crew
A board that knows the difference between an apprentice, a journeyman, and the ticket a job actually needs. Ratios and supervision requirements stop being something the office manager holds in their head.
03
Permits and inspections per job
Electrical permitting in BC is split between Technical Safety BC and the municipalities that run their own. Track the permit number, the authority, the inspection date, and the sign-off on the job record where it belongs.
04
Field capture from the truck
Hours, parts pulled, and photos logged on site. The office sees it the moment it is entered, so Friday billing stops being an archaeology project.
05
Service agreements and callbacks
Annual maintenance prompts, post-job follow-ups, and warranty terms attached to the job that created them. Callbacks get costed instead of quietly eating margin.
06
One screen for the owner
Receivables, jobs in flight, crew utilization, and margin by job type. Live, not a report someone builds on the last Friday of the month.
This is not theoretical.
A BC electrical contractor is running the whole operation on a system we built. We cannot name them, so here is the system instead.
Electrical Contractor Operations Platform
What got built
- Quotes, jobs, calendar, dispatch
- Inventory + price book with AI classification
- Workers, onboarding, warranties, upsells
- Customer + checklist workflows
- Analytics dashboard
What changed
- → Quote turnaround dropped from hours to minutes
- → Replaced a stack of 5+ tools
- → AI line-item classification eliminated manual lookup
You would not rent your bucket truck for the next twenty years at a price the rental company gets to raise every January.
What happens after the invoice.
Ownership
Source code, repositories, database, and hosting accounts go into your name on final payment. No licence, no renewal, nothing that switches off.
Support
No flat monthly retainer. Take the code and owe nothing, or keep an hourly relationship triaged by severity. Critical means now and costs more. Cosmetic gets the next available week.
Paying for it
Financing roughly matches what you already send to software vendors each month, spread over two years. At the end of it you stop paying and keep the system.
Switching over
Nobody on your crew should spend more than about fifteen minutes on the changeover. A new login and a password. Moving the data across is our job, not yours.
The worked example above uses a $30,000 build because that is a realistic figure for a system that runs an entire shop. A single workflow costs a fraction of it. Every quote is fixed before work starts, so the number you agree to is the number you pay. Tiers are laid out on the pricing page.
You check subs before they set foot on a site. Check us the same way.
- Commercial general liability
- $5,000,000
- Professional liability (E&O)
- $2,000,000
- Cyber liability
- $2,000,000
- WorkSafeBC account
- 201966367
Bound and in force.
Bound and in force.
Bound and in force.
Active. Clearance letter on request.
Certificates of insurance and a WorkSafeBC clearance letter are issued on request, usually the same day.
What shops ask first.
Will a custom build actually replace ServiceTitan or Jobber?
In most shops, yes. The parts of those products you use are a fraction of what you pay for, and they are the parts that are cheapest to build. The teardown exists to establish exactly which subscriptions come out of the stack before anyone quotes anything.
Who owns the software when it is finished?
You do. Source code, repositories, database, and hosting accounts go into your name on final payment. There is no licence to renew and nothing that switches off if you stop working with us.
What happens if we stop working with Bluestone?
You keep running. That is the point of owning it. The code is documented so any competent developer can pick it up, and the accounts are already yours. There is no monthly retainer holding the system hostage.
How does support work after launch?
Not as a flat monthly fee. Either you take the code and owe nothing further, or you keep an hourly relationship priced by how complex your system is. Work is triaged by severity: something critical is picked up immediately and costs more, something cosmetic goes in the next available week at the lower end.
Can it handle both Technical Safety BC and municipal permits?
Yes. The permitting authority is a field on the job, not an assumption baked into the product. Shops working across Metro Vancouver deal with both, and the system should track the permit number, the authority, and the inspection outcome the same way regardless of who issued it.
Do you work with shops outside Metro Vancouver?
Yes. The work is done remotely with on-site time where it matters, so Fraser Valley, Interior, and Vancouver Island shops are handled the same as a Burnaby one. Bluestone is registered in BC and carries a WorkSafeBC account for the site visits.
Free teardown for electrical contractors.
Show us how the shop actually runs: the quoting, the dispatch, the permit log, the spreadsheet. You get a written breakdown of what we would build, what it would replace, and what it would cost. If the answer is that you should keep what you have, we will say so.
Rather write it out? Send a message.
Further reading
- TradesWhen Jobber Stops Being Enough for an Electrical ContractorJobber is a good front door. But around 8 to 10 trucks, permits, inspections, and a service-plus-construction split start to break it. Here's how to tell, and what comes next.Read the note
- Field serviceServiceTitan vs. Custom: An Honest ComparisonServiceTitan is excellent at what it's built for. It's also the wrong tool for a lot of the trades businesses that signed for it. Here's an honest comparison of when each one is the right call.Read the note
- EconomicsWhy Per-Seat SaaS Pricing Punishes You for GrowingHire five people and the bill goes up five seats' worth, but the software did not get five times better. Here is the compounding math, the cases where per-seat is genuinely fair, and where the crossover lands.Read the note