Beware of Free Estimate APPS
Create an Estimate Easy as 1 2 3
Nothing is Free.
So if you’re a contractor or mechanic, you see Free Estimate Apps in your phones store and download one.
You start to use it.
Now your contacts and client info belongs to the scammers who created your Free App dummy.
After a month you find out the data is posted and gone. You need a real database to keep estimate and invoice data in long term.
You also gave them financial info to process payments. Instead of a real merchant processor or even a company like PayPal they use a 3rd party to get a commission off your billing forcing you to pay high processing fees.
Read the reviews, lots of businesses use these Apps and lose money when they are paid for jobs by clients. One of these Free Apps even have a phone number and none are in the USA, now you know why I call you DUMMY.
Nothing is free dummy.
I started computerizing Auto Mechanics and Contractors when PCs first started in early 80’s.
We used an expensive database that resided on a company’s expensive computer. Early computers costed a lot of money.
We had technicians to service the hardware. We had mobile trainers to teach workers who never saw a computer how to use one.
Average system was $20,000.
$5k computer
$10k software
$5k support and training
$20,000
Eventually cheap programs came out, not using databases, they only created estimates and invoices in a cheap accounting program. End of month it posted. The data was gone. It could not recreate the invoice months later, it became a line item in a cheap accounting program. Businesses need to be able to retrieve invoices, accounting systems not written in a database are cheap because they don’t have a DATABASE.
You get what you pay for in technology.
It’s 2019, one of the companies I founded decades ago still does Estimating Systems.
It’s still an expensive database only it is now running in the cloud. Now it’s connected to a companies website so contractors and mechanics can use phones, tablets or computers to create an estimate with 3 buttons.
Client info is stored securely on a clients website in the cloud. Payments go through clients merchant account or PayPal.
We don’t use cheap shared hosting for many reasons mostly security. Cheap servers are slow and prone to security issues.
You get what you pay for in technology.
If you use estimates in your business our system is at.
If you want Free shit, go fuck yourself dummy.
