Why we're building Tradesnap

You didn’t learn a trade to spend your evenings at the kitchen table writing quotes.

That’s the reason Tradesnap exists.

Over the past year we’ve talked to a lot of people in the trades, some of them while renovating. The conversation I keep coming back to was in early January, with an electrician I know.

He told me all his admin happens late in the evening or at the weekend. Writing quotes. Sending them. Invoicing.

So after eight to ten hours of client work, he sits down and does the business.

Every business owner has some version of that. But what if those hours shrank, by a lot, every year? For someone who’s already worn out after a full day of physical work, that’s worth something.

I’ve spent more than thirteen years building software where downtime isn’t an option: the e-health services behind 1177, middleware for Swedish public transport. Unglamorous work that nobody notices while it runs. Tradesnap is the same instinct pointed somewhere new: the paperwork that sits between a finished job and getting paid.

Here’s what pulled me in.

There aren’t enough tradespeople. This autumn, Installatörsföretagen asked 100 electrical installation firms how hard it is to find installers. 95 said very or fairly hard. Arbetsförmedlingen’s spring outlook names construction as the hardest sector in the country to hire for.

So an hour an electrician spends on admin is an hour of work that nobody else is there to do.

And the admin isn’t small. A survey of UK tradespeople this summer put quoting, invoicing and chasing payment at 5 hours and 20 minutes a week, much of it in the evenings and at weekends. More than half hadn’t taken a full week off in a year. In Germany and Austria, 42 percent of trade businesses say more than half their working time goes to office work instead of the site.

Five hours a week is most of a working day. Every week. On top of the actual work.

Tradespeople have already started using AI for this. In ServiceTitan’s survey of 1,017 US contractors, two in three of those using AI save at least three hours a week.

The same survey had a number that stuck with me more. Only 11 percent of contractors place high trust in their AI tools. 58 percent trust them little or not at all.

I get that. A quote has your name on it. If the AI gets the materials wrong, it’s your margin and your customer on the line, not the software company’s.

So that’s the line we’ve drawn with Tradesnap. The AI drafts. The tradesperson decides.

You describe the job in your own words, on your phone. Tradesnap turns it into a quote you can check line by line, send as a link, and turn into an invoice with one tap.

Nothing goes out that you haven’t seen.

We built the first version through the spring. Late nights and weekends, next to the work that paid the bills.

After the summer we opened a private beta. It’s nearing its end now: mostly polish and small bug fixes, and the iterations are fast. We’re getting ready to go live for everyone.

We’re a small, dedicated team, and right now the job is keeping the momentum. This is just the beginning. The backlog is long. We’re here to create the future of quoting and invoicing for skilled trades businesses.

Less paperwork. More paid work. That’s the whole pitch.

If you’re a tradesperson in Sweden and want to try it: tradesnaphq.com.