About
About Seaway Forge
Seaway Forge is written by Chris Carlin from Massena, New York, on the St. Lawrence River. The name comes from the Seaway that runs past the town. The site covers the software small home-service businesses run on.
Why this site exists
Search for scheduling software for a plumbing business and you get page after page of the same article: ten tools, a paragraph each, every one of them "powerful and intuitive," no prices, and a button. Nobody who wrote those pages has watched a two-person shop try to reschedule a Friday afternoon from a truck cab.
The gap is not information. Vendors publish plenty of that. The gap is judgment — somebody willing to say that a tool is aimed at a fifteen-tech operation and will waste your money at your size, or that the category you are shopping in does not solve the problem you actually have. That is what this site tries to be.
Who I am
I run a small marketing agency that works with home-service businesses — HVAC, electrical, landscaping, the trades generally. That is how I ended up looking at this software in the first place. When you spend your days on lead flow for a heating company, you find out fast which apps the owner curses at and which ones they forget they are paying for.
That proximity is the reason I think this site is worth writing, and it is also the thing you should weigh when you read it. I am not a licensed electrician. I have not run a service van. What I have is a lot of conversations with people who do, and a habit of reading pricing pages carefully.
How the coverage is put together
- Prices come from the vendor's own pricing page. Every figure on this site is quoted from a page we opened, with the URL and the date we opened it listed in the article's Sources section.
- Where a vendor hides pricing, we say so. Several field-service platforms will not publish a number. "Quote only" is the honest answer and it tells you something real about who the product is sold to.
- Prices go stale. Software vendors reprice constantly. The check date on each article is there so you can judge how much to trust the number. If you find one that has moved, let me know.
- No vendor gets a preview. Nobody reviews an article before it runs, and no placement here is for sale.
What this site is not
It is not a hands-on testing lab. I have not run every one of these tools through a season of real jobs, and I am not going to claim otherwise so an article reads better. Where a judgment is mine rather than a fact from a vendor page, the writing says so.
It is also not accounting, tax or legal advice. Software that touches your invoicing and your payment processing touches your books, and your accountant knows your situation and I do not.
How it makes money
The plan is affiliate commissions — the standard arrangement where a publisher earns a referral fee if a reader signs up for a product. As of 21 July 2026 there are no affiliate links anywhere on this site and no active affiliate relationships. When that changes, the affiliate disclosure changes with it, on the same day.
Get in touch
Corrections, stale prices, and "you got this wrong" emails are all welcome — see the contact page. Start with the cost guide if you are trying to work out what a full stack should run you, or the all-in-one comparison if you are deciding how to assemble it.