Introducing ContractorsChat: A Better Way to Build Together

Today we're opening ContractorsChat to early access in Upstate South Carolina. I'm Dennis Antipkin, one of the founders. This post is the short version of what we built, why we built it, and why we're starting small on purpose.

Here's the number that wouldn't leave us alone. FMI and PlanGrid surveyed nearly 600 construction leaders and put the cost of rework caused by miscommunication and bad project data at $31.3 billion a year in the US alone. Not weather. Not material prices. Communication.

That number isn't abstract if you've run jobs. It's the tile that went in before the change order made it past the group text. It's the sub who showed up Tuesday because nobody told him the framing slipped to Thursday. We kept living it, so we built the thing we wished existed.

The problem we kept living

A typical small GC runs every job through about five tools that don't talk to each other. None of them was built for the job, and the gaps between them are where money leaks out.

• A group text for the crew, where the client's scope change is buried 200 messages up between a meme and a parking photo.
• Paper timesheets or memory for hours, reconciled Friday night from a tailgate guess.
• A Word doc for quotes and invoices, emailed out whenever you finally get to a laptop.
• Facebook groups and word of mouth to find a sub when your drywaller ghosts.
• A camera roll with 4,000 photos and no way to tell which slab pour belongs to which job.

Two failures show up over and over. First, scope dies in group texts. The client asks for the upgrade, somebody thumbs-up reacts, nobody writes the change order, and three weeks later you're arguing about who pays for it. Second, invoices go out late, because invoicing lives on a desktop you don't sit at until Sunday. Late invoice, late payment, and now your A/R aging is funding someone else's project.

And the tools don't just fail individually — they fail to connect. The hours your crew worked never touch the invoice. The photo that proves the work was done never touches the dispute. Every handoff between tools is a retype, and every retype is a chance to get it wrong. We tried the big platforms first, same as you probably did. They were built for the office trailer with a desk and a second monitor, priced for companies with a software budget line, and they treated the phone like an afterthought. We bounced. So did every GC we talked to.

What we built

ContractorsChat is one app that runs the jobsite side of your business: the conversation, the hours, the subs, and the money. Four core pieces, all on the features page in detail:

• Project channels. Every job is a chat channel. Crew talk, client decisions, photos, documents, and change orders live in one thread you can actually search later.
• GPS timeclock. Your crew clocks in from the jobsite, with location attached. Hours roll up into a payroll-ready CSV export instead of a Friday-night reconstruction.
• Trades directory. A two-sided directory of local GCs and trades. Find a sub, check their track record, and invite them to bid without posting into the void.
• Quotes to invoices. Build the quote on your phone, convert it to an invoice when the work's done, and get paid through your own Stripe account. The money trail stays attached to the project it came from.

Around the core four sit the pieces that make them hold together on a real job: change orders that get written and acknowledged in the channel instead of implied in a text, a document vault per project so the permit set and the punch list aren't in three inboxes, and a client portal so the homeowner can see progress without calling you at 7 PM. Because everything lives in one place, the connections come free — the hours feed the payroll export, the quote becomes the invoice, the photo sits in the same thread as the decision it documents.

The principles behind it

Three decisions shaped everything else, and they're the reason this isn't just another project management tool with a chat tab bolted on.

Chat-native

The jobsite already runs on chat — it just runs on the wrong chat. Instead of fighting that, we made the conversation the spine of the product. Every project is a channel. The change order isn't in a separate module you forget to open; it's pinned in the thread where the client asked for it.

Mobile-first

The primary device in this industry is a phone in a truck, usually held one-handed, often in direct sunlight. Desktop-first software treats that phone as a fallback. We treat it as the whole job. ContractorsChat installs straight from the browser as a PWA — no app store, no IT department, working in about two minutes.

Two-sided reputation

Every directory rates the trades. Almost none of them rate the GCs. Ours does both: GCs rate the subs who work for them, and subs rate the GCs they work for — including whether they pay on time. Slow-pay GCs and no-show subs both carry their record with them. We think that's only fair.

Why we're starting in Upstate South Carolina

Because density is the product. A trades directory with three electricians in your county is useless, and a national launch guarantees exactly that — a thin layer of users spread across fifty markets, none of them able to find each other. One region done right beats fifty done thin.

So we're putting everything into Greenville, Spartanburg, and the surrounding Upstate first. Enough GCs and trade crews in one place that the directory actually answers the question it exists for: who can pour my footers Thursday, and do they show up? When the Upstate works, we'll earn the next region. Not before.

It also means the feedback loop is short. These are our roads and our subs. When a framer in Boiling Springs tells us the timeclock is annoying, we can fix it that week and see him use the fix.

The beta deal

Early access members get 6 months of the Pro plan free. No credit card. Pro normally runs $79/mo and covers up to 25 active projects, 15 team members, the full trades directory with invite-to-bid, the GPS timeclock with payroll export, and the client portal — full plan details are on the pricing page.

You also get a direct line to the founders. Not a ticket queue — us. Beta members shape what gets built next, and the people who get in early will recognize their own complaints in the next six months of releases.

What we ask in return is simple: use it on a real job and tell us where it falls short. That's the whole trade. There's no contract, and since there's no card on file, there's no auto-charge waiting at the end of the six months and nothing to forget to cancel. The FAQ covers the fine print, but there isn't much of it.

What's next

Honestly: we listen. The roadmap for the next six months belongs to the crews who join the beta, not to a slide deck. We'll keep tightening the core four — channels, timeclock, directory, money — and we'll expand to the next region when the Upstate proves the model.

If you run jobs in the Upstate, we built this for you, and we'd rather have your complaints than anyone else's compliments. Come kick the tires.

— Dennis Antipkin, founder, ContractorsChat