Subser Is on iPhone and Android, and It Keeps Working When the Signal Drops
Subser is now on the App Store and Google Play, with two new features: Job Notebook for photos, markup and customer galleries, and offline mode for basements, crawl spaces and dead zones.
Subser is now on both phones. Get it on the App Store or on Google Play.
The apps come with two new features: Job Notebook and offline mode. One is about what you can prove when the job's done. The other is about the job getting done at all when your phone shows zero bars.
Offline mode: keep working when the signal drops
Every contractor has a list of places where phones go to die. The basement under a 1920s Craftsman. The crawl space. The new build with the metal roof already on. That job forty minutes past the last cell tower.
Software that needs a connection is useless in exactly those places, which happen to be where a lot of the work is.
So the Subser app now keeps your jobs, customers, and tasks on the phone. Open a job in a dead zone and it's there. Keep working, and your changes are saved on the device. When you're back in range, they sync on their own. You don't have to press anything or remember anything. A sync screen shows what's still waiting to go out, if you're the type who wants to watch.
Offline mode is in the apps, not the web version, and it's included on every paid plan.
Job Notebook: every job keeps its own record
Photos used to be the part of the job that lived in your camera roll, mixed in with your kid's soccer game and a screenshot of a part number. Now every job has a notebook.
Photos land where they belong. Take a picture from inside a job and it goes into that job's notebook, grouped on a timeline by phase. Before shots stay with before shots. Nobody has to sort anything at 9 p.m.
Mark them up. Draw arrows, shapes, and text on a photo, then move or resize them. There's a blur tool for the things the customer doesn't need to see, like the homeowner's mail on the counter or the next-door neighbor's license plate.
Measure from the photo. Drag a line across a picture and read the real distance, in feet and inches or metric. This one needs an iPhone Pro or iPad Pro.
Send the customer a gallery. Pick the shots, and the customer gets a branded link. They don't need an app or an account to open it. It's the before-and-after they'd otherwise ask you to text them one picture at a time.
The notebook also holds everything else about the job: the customer, the crew, the price and line items, the tasks, and an activity timeline as it moves from scheduled to en route to in progress to completed to paid. When there's a question three months later about what was done, you have the answer and the pictures to back it up.
Everything else in your pocket
The rest of Subser comes along on both apps. Your day's jobs and route. The calendar. Crew assignments. Tasks, including voice capture, where you say what needs doing and it becomes a task. Estimates the customer approves from a link. Invoices with a payment link, card, Apple Pay, and Google Pay through Stripe with no markup from us, plus a way to record cash and checks. Recurring jobs. Automatic reminders. And an "on my way" link so the customer can see you're coming, which ends the "between noon and four" conversation.
On iPhone, the app is built natively in Swift, so it opens fast. That matters more than it sounds like it should when you're opening it with one glove off.
One price for the whole crew
Same rule on the phone as everywhere else: no per-user fees. Every person on the crew can have the app and their own login, up to 75 people, and the bill doesn't change when you hire. The apprentice gets the task list in front of him. The office gets the photos without asking for them. The record shows who did what.
There's a free plan to start, paid plans from $19 a month, and a 14-day trial of Pro with no credit card. Details are on the pricing page.
Tell me what's missing
If something in the apps is missing, slow, or just annoying, write in through the support page. It comes to me.