Solution: A 'know your real number, then price from it' engine: (1) Guided overhead intake — walks the owner through every real cost (rent, admin pay, insurance, truck/fuel, tools, software, owner salary, target profit) without needing an accountant; (2) Burdened-rate + break-even calculation — factors in billable efficiency (windshield time, supply runs, shop time) to produce the true minimum billable hourly rate and per-job floor; (3) Custom price book generator — turns those numbers into a flat-rate price book for the shop's specific services, priced from THEIR costs, not generic national averages; (4) Live floor warnings — when building a quote, flags 'this is below your break-even' before the contractor sends it; (5) Always-current — when costs change (fuel, insurance, a raise), the floor and price book update automatically; (6) 'Good/better/best' option builder for upselling at the door. ICP: Owner-operators and small residential service contractors who price by feel or by matching local competitors, and only count materials plus their own time — ignoring overhead (rent, office staff, insurance, vehicles, tools) and the brutal reality that you can only bill 5–6 of 8 paid hours. They're one slow month from insolvency without knowing it. The 459-upvote, 609-comment '$311 a billable hour' thread — where a TN electrical contractor calculated his real costs and discovered he was charging less than half his break-even — is the single most validated business-pain signal in this dataset.
It starts from the contractor's real, continuously-updated numbers and produces a usable, custom price book plus quote-time floor warnings — bridging the gap between the one-shot free calculator (which stops at a number) and the generic national price book (which isn't your costs). The live 'you're quoting below break-even' guardrail is the behavior-changing feature nothing else offers at this price point.
“Similar to how budgeting apps that warn you at the point of spending rather than just showing a report beat one-shot calculators. This is a budgeting-app-style guardrail for trade pricing — it doesn't just tell you your number once, it enforces it at the moment you quote.”