u/ApplianceOps

Should I open a Mexican street stlyle food cart with el pastor tacos?

(Trompas what we call it)

Would totally just teach the fam how to cook it and let them keep the profit tbh - I miss the tacos

Long-time tech here. Ran my route on Housecall Pro for a while, tried Jobber before that. Both are fine — for plumbers, HVAC, lawn guys, electricians, cleaners. They're built for everyone, which means they're built for nobody in particular.

For appliance repair specifically I kept hitting the same walls:

• Per-machine pricing? Nope, you fake it with line items.
• Manufacturing date / install date / serial / model fields? Add a custom field and pray the tech fills it in.
• Warranty company billing where the customer doesn't pay? Hacks.
• Parts lookup by model number? Doesn't exist.
• Decent dispatch on a phone in the truck? On HCP it's clunky as hell.

Plus the prices. HCP starts around $79 if you're solo, $189 once you add anyone, and you're locked out of half the features unless you go higher. ServiceTitan won't even talk to you under three figures a month per seat. Jobber is in between but again — generalist.

So I built ApplianceOps. $35/month flat, all features, $15/seat for extra techs.

Stuff that's actually different:

• Built around appliances. Dryer, washer, fridge, dishwasher, range — they're first-class objects with their own data, not "custom fields."
• AI diagnosis assist. Tech describes the symptom on the call, gets likely failure modes pulled from the model number.
• Photo of the tag → fills in make/model/serial automatically.
• Smart routing for the day's calls.
• Real mobile-first dispatch (no resizing the desktop view).
• Direct customer payment links, QuickBooks sync, the usual.

Honest about where I'm not there yet:

• It's me running it. One guy. No support team.
• Some of the polish HCP has from 10 years of dev — I don't have that. UI is clean but it's not slick the way theirs is.
• A few corners are still rough. I fix them as users find them.

It's at applianceops.pro if you want to poke at it. 14-day trial, no card. If you've used HCP or Jobber and bailed, or never started because of the price, it might be your thing. If it's not, tell me what's missing and I'll probably build it.

Happy to answer questions or just trade war stories about appliance work.