When a website is not enough.
A website tells people you exist. Sometimes the job needs software: a place a customer signs in and sees their own equipment, a form that gives a real number instead of "call us", a tool your techs use in the field. That is a different build, priced per project, and it is the one thing here we can show you already running.
- From
- $5,500 per project
- Running cost
- Often nothing — see below
- You own
- The code and the data
What is a web application, and how is it different from a website?
A website is pages a visitor reads. A web application is something a person uses: it has accounts, it remembers things, it does work. For an HVAC contractor that usually means a place customers sign in to see their own equipment and service history, a tool that turns a few answers into a real estimate, or something the crew fills in on a phone at the job. Elementals builds these per project from $5,500, in the browser with no app store, and the code is yours.
- Price
- From $5,500 per project
- Runs on
- Any browser, no app to install
- Monthly
- Only if it actually costs something
- Ownership
- Code and data are yours
What a contractor could build
- A customer portal
- Your customer signs in and sees their own system: model and serial, install date, what was done last visit, when the warranty runs out, whether the maintenance plan is current. It answers the calls your office is currently answering by hand.
- A real estimate, instantly
- A homeowner answers five questions — square footage, current system age, single or two-storey — and gets a genuine range instead of "call for pricing". You set the ranges, so it can never quote a number you would not honour. The lead arrives with the answers attached.
- A field report the customer receives
- The tech fills in a checklist on a phone at the job, adds photos of what he found, and the customer gets a clean report with your name on it before the truck leaves. It is the cheapest way a small shop looks like a large one.
- A maintenance-plan area
- Members see what their plan covers, when the next visit is due, and renew without phoning. Plans are the most predictable revenue in this trade and the least well served by paper.
- A commercial client dashboard
- A property manager with eleven rooftop units across four buildings sees all of them, their service history, and what is still open. This is the kind of thing that wins a commercial account and then keeps it.
- An internal tool, when the big software is overkill
- Not every shop needs a full dispatch platform at a seat price per technician. Sometimes what is missing is one narrow tool — an inventory count, a subcontractor log, a warranty-claim tracker — that nobody sells because it is too specific to sell.
- Built into the browser
- No app store, no download, no approval queue. It opens from a link on a phone or a laptop, and updating it is us shipping a change, not your customers updating an app.
- It is yours
- The code and the data belong to you, and we hand them over if you leave. There is no platform of ours in the middle holding your customer list.
Questions about this
Have you actually built one of these?
Yes, and you can open them. We built two web apps for LIFT — a restaurant in Tegucigalpa the founder co-owns, which we say plainly rather than dress up as a client — one for reservations and one for its frequent-customer programme, sharing a database. This site is the third thing we built. All of them are on our work page, live and linked. What we have not done is build one for an HVAC contractor, and we are not going to pretend otherwise: the examples above are what the thing could be built to do, not work already delivered in this trade.
Why is this priced per project instead of a published number?
Because the floor is published and the ceiling genuinely is not knowable in advance. $5,500 is a real starting point for a focused app — one job, done properly. What moves it above that: how many kinds of user sign in, whether it has to talk to your existing software, how much of your process has to be encoded, and whether anything needs to work offline in a basement with no signal. Every other price on this site is fixed because the scope is fixed. This one is not, and quoting a flat number would mean overcharging the simple builds to cover the complicated ones.
What does it cost to keep running?
Often nothing, and we will tell you which case you are in before you commit. A small app with modest traffic fits inside the free tiers of the platforms we build on — the two we run for LIFT cost zero a month, and we are not going to invent a fee for something that costs us nothing. What does cost money: a database with real volume, a paid service the app depends on, or an app you want changed frequently. Then you pay what the platforms actually charge, at cost with no markup, plus care for the changes. You get that number in writing before the build starts.
Should I get one of these?
Probably not first, and possibly not at all. If you do not have a website that loads fast and shows up on Google, this is the wrong thing to spend $5,500 on and we will say so. A web app is worth building when you can name the specific hours it gives back or the specific job it wins — a commercial account that expects a portal, an office spending its mornings answering "what did you do last time", or estimates you are losing because the first shop to give a number gets the call.
Can it connect to ServiceTitan, Housecall Pro or Jobber?
Usually, and that is often the point — the app becomes the part your software does not do, rather than a second place to type everything. Whether it connects cleanly depends on what your system exposes, so tell us what you run and we will check before quoting rather than after. If it cannot connect properly, we will say that too; a tool that needs double entry gets abandoned in a month.
How long does it take?
Longer than a website, and we will give you the number once we know the scope. A website is a week or less because we are not inventing the shape of it every time. Software is different work: the shape is the job. We build in stages you can open and use, so you are looking at something running rather than waiting on a launch date.
Does it work on a phone?
It is built for the phone first, like everything else we ship. Your techs are on phones and so are your customers — a field checklist that only works on a laptop is a field checklist nobody fills in.
See what a customer sees.
Send us your business name and we will run a full audit of what somebody searching for you actually finds — site, Google listing, citations, reviews, and the three shops outranking you. Normally $2,000. Free, no call required.