What happens to my customers’ information?
It goes into a database that belongs to your business and stays there. Nobody sells it, nobody mines it, no other operator sees it, and nothing in it trains anything.
Here is exactly what gets stored, so there are no surprises:
- Your clients — names, service addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, whatever notes you keep on them.
- Your work — jobs, dates, what was done, quotes, invoices, what was paid and what is still owed.
- Photographs of customers’ property — the before-and-afters your crew takes on site.
- Text threads — the actual messages between your business and your customers, both directions.
- Your crew — names, pay rates, hours, payouts.
Two things about that list are worth saying out loud because most field software does the opposite. Photographs are re-encoded before they are stored, which drops the GPS coordinates, the device serial and the timestamp a phone camera writes into every image — so a customer’s home address never ends up embedded in a picture behind a shareable link. And the software never asks your phone where it is: there is no crew tracking, no live map, no breadcrumb trail, not as a setting and not switched off by default.
The companies that touch it on the way through are named, one by one, on the privacy page — who they are, what they do, and which country they are in.
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Can I get my book back out?
Yes. One button in settings writes the whole thing to a file on your computer: clients, jobs, invoices, quotes, leads, payments, commercial jobs, standing plans, contractor batches, campaigns, crew, crew adjustments, payouts, your message templates and your settings.
The part that matters is how it runs. That button works off the data the app has already downloaded into your browser. It does not call my server, it does not need my permission, and there is nothing on my end to switch off. An export that goes through a vendor’s server is an export that vendor can turn off; this one isn’t.
It also checks itself. The file records how many rows of each kind it should contain, the app counts what it actually wrote, and it tells you if those two ever disagree — so a truncated backup announces itself instead of sitting on your disk looking fine.
The honest shape of it today, in two parts. The whole-book button gives you one structured data file, which is the right thing to rebuild from but not the thing you open in Excel — the spreadsheet-friendly exports (clients, invoices, the tax report, sales, crew and payouts) are separate CSV buttons on their own screens. And your job photographs are not inside that file: they are image files sitting in storage, so the export points at them rather than containing them. Ask and I send you the photos with the rest, the same day. If getting out is ever awkward, that is my problem to solve, not yours to work around.
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What if I stop paying?
Nothing dramatic happens, because there is nothing set up to do anything dramatic. There is no subscription system, nothing has your card, and I invoice you by hand each month. So there is no automated switch that trips at midnight on a missed payment.
What I can tell you for certain is that the way out is never the thing that gets locked. The export is a rule, not a favour, and the reason is not generosity: the people in that list are your customers, and under Canadian privacy law they have rights of access and correction that you cannot honour from an account somebody else has bolted shut. Holding your book hostage would make you unable to obey the law. That is not a lever I want to own.
There is also no contract, no minimum term and no cancellation flow to hunt for. You stop by telling me you’re stopping. The written version is in the terms.
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Who can see my customers?
Inside your business: only the people you give an account to. Every person has their own account carrying a role, and the role is stamped onto their sign-in by the server — a phone cannot award itself one.
What that role hard-stops is changing things. A crew account cannot write to the payout ledger, the crew adjustments or your settings: the database refuses, so there is no menu to hide and no version of the app that gets around it. On their screens they get their own day and their own pay.
Now the part most vendors leave out, and it is the reason this answer is three paragraphs instead of one. Your business is stored as a single record and the app loads it onto the phone in one piece — that is the same design that lets a crew read the whole day in a driveway with no bars. So a crew account’s browser holds more of your book than its screens ever show it, and somebody determined enough to open the developer tools on their own phone could read further than the app lets them tap, the pay-rate map included. The writes are locked, the screens are right, and the reads are not yet split. Breaking that one record into separate pieces so reading is gated the way writing already is, is the next job on that file. I’d rather you heard it here than worked it out yourself in month four.
Every person gets their own account. There is no shared login. There was one, once — six accounts including the owner’s sharing a single password that was sitting in the source code — and it was torn out. It mattered for an ordinary reason, not a dramatic one: a seasonal cleaner who left in October still held write access to the invoice book, and removing one person meant changing everybody’s password on a working day.
Outside your business: each operator gets their own project, with its own database, its own storage and its own keys. Another CrewDocket business isn’t a row in a table next to yours; it is somewhere else entirely.
And me. I am one person and I do the support, so I’ll answer the awkward half of this plainly: I can reach the infrastructure your data sits on, in the same way any small vendor’s founder can. What I don’t claim is a certification I don’t have — no SOC 2, no ISO 27001, no independent penetration test. The privacy page lists what is actually true of the security today, and what I refuse to claim, in the same two columns.
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There’s no signal in half the driveways I park in.
You can read your whole day with no bars. The schedule, the addresses, the gate code, the customer’s notes, what was done last time and what the job is worth are already on the phone and come up without a connection. The app itself is stored on the phone too — it opens on a dead signal instead of showing a browser error page.
What needs signal is saving. Marking a job done or writing a note goes through a transaction against the server, and with no bars it doesn’t land. The app says so in those words — you get told the changes didn’t save and that you’ll need to redo them once you have signal — which is annoying and true. It does not show you a tick and quietly lose the work.
Photographs are the exception, and they are the thing crews actually lose. A photo taken with no signal is shrunk and parked on the phone, survives the app being closed, and uploads itself when you come back into range. The day sheet shows you the count waiting. The limits, since a queue with no limit eventually eats the phone: forty photos parked at once, and anything still stranded after a week is dropped rather than kept forever.
An offline queue for the rest of it — the done taps and the notes — is being built. Until it ships, the words “offline mode” are not going on this website, because most driveways have a bar and the ones that don’t are exactly where you’d find out I’d lied.
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What if my crew hates it?
Here’s what I can tell you, and what I can’t.
What I can: there is nothing to install. It’s a web page they add to the home screen — no app store, no download, no update to chase, no licence to buy for them, and no extra charge for adding a fourth person. The day sheet is one screen: the stops in drive order, the address, what’s being done, and a done button. Their screens show their own jobs and their own pay and nothing else, which removes the two arguments that usually kill a rollout — “why can he see my rate” and “I don’t know which of these is mine”. What sits behind those screens is answered exactly in the question above, because “the screen doesn’t show it” and “the database won’t hand it over” are different sentences and I’m not going to blur them.
What I can’t: I haven’t watched this software on somebody else’s phone. It has run my own business every working day, but every mobile check in my development process was a desktop browser resized to phone width — which cannot see a software keyboard, a notch, or a real touch event. I found that out in July, wrote it down, and stopped calling mobile “verified”. Testing on a real iPhone and a real Android happens before anyone else’s crew depends on it.
And the practical answer: if your crew won’t use it, you stop, and there is no contract making that expensive. I would rather find that out in month one with you than argue about it in month nine.
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What if you get bored, or get hit by a bus?
Fair question, and it’s the right one to ask a one-person company.
Two things are true. Your data isn’t hostage to me being here — the export runs in your browser without touching my server, so it keeps working on a day I do not. And this isn’t a side project I’m going to lose interest in: it runs my own company. If CrewDocket stops, I stop invoicing. That’s a harder guarantee than a funding round.
What I won’t pretend: if the bus got me tomorrow, you’d have your data and you would not have the software. That’s the real shape of buying from one person. It is why there is no contract, and it is part of why the price is what it is. What happens to your book in an orderly shutdown is written down rather than left to trust — it’s section 15 of the terms.
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Will it text my customers on its own?
No. Not once, not ever, and not as a setting buried three screens deep that you have to find and switch off.
CrewDocket reads an incoming text and fills in the reply, the booking, the invoice or the reminder — then it stops and waits for you. Every outbound path in the software ends at a person pressing send. There is no scheduler. There was one briefly; it was deleted in May 2026 and deliberately left disconnected so a routine deploy could never quietly bring it back.
The single exception is the opposite of contacting somebody: when a customer replies STOP, the software records that by itself, immediately, and excludes them from everything afterwards. Recording a refusal is not a message.
Everyone else in this market is racing to build an assistant that talks to your customers by itself. I’m not going to. You’ve met the customer who got the wrong message, and it went out in your name, not the software’s.
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I’m seasonal. I’m dead from November to April.
Nothing auto-charges you, because there is nothing set up to auto-charge you. No card on file, no subscription, no billing system at all — I send you an invoice by hand each month. So pausing for the winter is a text message, not a cancellation flow you have to hunt for and not a retention call you have to sit through.
Your book stays where it is either way. When you come back in April, the standing plans, the client history and last season’s photos are exactly where you left them.
What a paused month costs is the one number I won’t type on a web page before I’ve said it to you out loud. Through the founding phase I set that by hand with each operator, and I would rather agree it with you than publish something I have to walk back. You get it in writing, before you start, not after.
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I’m on Jobber. How bad is switching?
Honestly? The importer isn’t built yet. So today I do it: you send me your export, I load your clients, your jobs and your open invoices, and you start with your own book in front of you instead of an empty screen.
That’s an afternoon of my time and almost none of yours, and it’s a large part of why I’m only taking ten businesses to begin with.
The other half of the switch is your texting number, and that one has a clock I don’t control — carrier registration for a business number runs for weeks. We start it on day one for exactly that reason. The pricing page explains the wait, and what a text actually costs once Canadian carrier fees are counted.
What I’m not going to tell you is that there’s a one-click Jobber importer, because there isn’t one, and you’d find that out in the first ten minutes.
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I’m not a window cleaner.
Then read this bit carefully, because I’d rather lose the sale than surprise you in week two.
CrewDocket was built for window cleaning, and it shows in exactly two places:
- Crew pay is modelled as a percentage of what the job was worth. That’s the norm in window cleaning and pressure washing. It is wrong for a landscaper paid hourly or a roofer paid per square.
- The text-reading engine knows window-cleaning words. It’ll read “Thursday afternoon” or “can you come back, the front ones streaked” for anybody. “Four storefronts and the transoms” only lands here.
Everything else — scheduling, quoting, deposits, invoicing, chasing, photos, standing plans, crew payouts, per-job profit — doesn’t care what the work is, only that a crew turned up at an address and did it.
If you’re in an hourly trade, say so on the call. There’s an honest stopgap the software already handles today — set the crew percentage to zero and pay per job — and proper hourly pay is a real build rather than a switch I can flip for you.
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What does it cost?
One price, for the business, not per person on your crew. No add-on tier holding the good part hostage. The figure itself we agree on the call — through the founding phase I set it with each operator rather than posting one, and yours goes in writing before you start. Everything it includes, and the list of what isn’t built yet, are on one page.
Texting is the cost that catches people out, so it is on that page too, with the real Ontario numbers rather than the sticker rate.
No card, no trial clock, no contract. During the founding phase I invoice you by hand out of CrewDocket itself — which is also the fastest way to see what your own customers will receive.
You don’t have to settle the price to look at it. Open a workspace — a minute, no card — and your trade’s price list goes in for you. Or email me first and we do the call before anything else.
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Who are you?
Sam, in Collingwood, Ontario. I clean windows. I built this because I was running a crew out of my head, my phone and a notebook in the truck, and everything I tried was designed by people who had never stood in a driveway on a Sunday night trying to remember what somebody was owed.
It runs my company: the crew’s schedule, the customer texts, the invoices, the pay. The longer version, and what’s actually behind each claim, is on the front page.
If your question isn’t on this page, email sam@crewdocket.com and ask it. I answer them myself, including the ones where the answer is no.
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