There's a specific kind of evening every solo contractor knows.
You come home from a kitchen-repaint walkthrough at 7 PM. You have rough numbers in a notebook, a phone full of photos, and a customer who wants the estimate "by tomorrow if possible." So you sit down at the kitchen table, fire up the laptop, and start the dance.
Spreadsheet for the line items. Word doc for the proposal copy. PDF export. Email client to send the PDF. A separate Stripe payment link copy-pasted into the email body. A reminder in your phone calendar to follow up in three days. Maybe a CRM if you've gotten that far — but probably not, because the last one you tried wanted $69/month and felt like overkill for two estimates a week.
That's the moment we started building Senku.
What was actually broken
The contractor software market is not empty. It's full. The problem isn't that nobody built tools for trade contractors — it's that almost everything in the market is built for one of two extremes:
The enterprise GC tool. Procore, Buildxact, ProEst. Priced for firms with project managers and bid teams, with feature sets designed around bid leveling and subcontractor portals. Most solo contractors will never use 5% of what's in the box.
The lightweight invoicing app. Joist, Wave, Bookipi. Genuinely useful for sending an invoice. Mostly useless for managing a job after the estimate is signed.
The middle is where most actual contracting work happens — and the middle is dominated by Jobber, Housecall Pro, Kickserv. Those are fine. But they're priced at $39 to $59 entry, they bury features the solo guy needs behind higher tiers, and the customer-facing portal experience is consistently weak.
So we sat down and listed what we actually wanted, building from the perspective of a working painting contractor:
- Send an estimate by SMS, not just email, because that's how customers actually reply.
- A customer portal that doesn't require login — token-based, mobile-first, opens in any browser.
- Tenant-owned Stripe: the contractor's own Stripe account collects the money. Senku never holds funds.
- AI line items that draft from a one-sentence scope so quoting takes 5 minutes, not 45.
- A lead-capture quiz that lives on the contractor's own website and routes qualified leads back into the dashboard.
- A free plan that does something. Not a "trial that ends in 14 days" — a free tier that's the actual entry point.
Building from the truck bed
Every feature in Senku exists because we hit the problem in a real job, on a real day. Perfect Finish Painters — the painting contractor business one of us runs — has been Senku's first tenant since the start.
That means the roadmap is driven by what hurt that week. The customer-portal payment recording flow shipped because a customer paid by Stripe at 8 PM, the contractor didn't see the payment until the daily cron caught it the next afternoon, and we both spent an hour going "did you actually pay?" "I thought I did?" The deposit-acceptance email flow shipped because a customer wanted to approve a 25% deposit by clicking a button on their phone, not by signing a paper agreement. The worker kiosk shipped because hourly crew shouldn't need a Senku account to clock in.
None of those features came from a strategy deck. They came from the truck bed.
What's next
The product is still small. There's a long list of things we know it doesn't do well yet. We're building toward an idiom — software that fits a working contractor's day the way a good measuring tape fits a working contractor's belt loop. Reliable. Always within reach. Doesn't slow you down.
If that sounds like what you've been looking for, start a free account — there's no card required, and the free tier covers basic estimating with no time limit. We'd rather you stick around because the product is useful than because we trapped you in a trial.
And if there's a feature you've been wishing existed in your contractor software, email us. We read every one. Some of them ship.