About
Built in a repair shop, not a boardroom.
Speedish Software LLC is a small software company in Danville, Indiana, run by Chris Hackleman. The products come out of problems we had first and solved for ourselves before selling them to anybody.
The order of events
Every product started as something we needed.
- The shop
Speedish Automotive opens its bays
A European specialist shop in Danville, Indiana. BMW, Mercedes-Benz, Audi, Porsche. Repair, custom builds, performance work. The place where every complaint on this page was originally formed.
- The frustration
Shop software turns out to be terrible
Dated interfaces, features held hostage behind upgrade tiers, per-seat pricing that punishes you for hiring, systems that pick the busiest morning of the month to fall over. The obvious response was to keep complaining. We picked the other one.
- The product
ShopBase
Shop management written next to the counter it runs. Unlimited users, no per-seat fee, no contract, and the features that competitors bill as add-ons simply included.
- The moat
The Open Labor Project
Rather than pay $180 a month for labor times, we built the database, then gave the web version away. Free repair data for anyone with a wrench, and the reason our own products can include real labor content at no extra cost.
- The expansion
HeavyBase, Heavy Labor Project, Recon Desk
The same spine pointed at heavy equipment, diesel trucks, and dealer reconditioning. Three verticals, one codebase underneath, each one cheaper to build than the last.
- The classroom
Cullinan Academy
Homeschooling five kids and finding nothing that actually adapted to any of them. So: adaptive placement, deep lessons, calibrated mastery checks, and spaced repetition scheduled into the calendar. $29 per kid per month.
- The house
What's Cooking, MoneyBase, Vacation Pics
Feeding a large family on a hard grocery budget, running the household money without handing a company your transaction history, and keeping the family photos somewhere other than a subscription. Three more problems we had, solved the same way as the rest.
What you can expect
Small company, on purpose.
Say the price out loud
Pricing lives on the pricing page. No demo required to learn what it costs, no discount that only appears when you threaten to leave.
Support is the person who built it
Write in and you reach someone who can actually change the software. There is no tier one, because there is no tier two to escalate to.
Free things stay free
The Open Labor Project's web access is not a trial for a paywall. It funds itself through sponsors and the API, and that is the arrangement.
Build for the ugly Tuesday
Not the demo, not the screenshot. The morning when four cars are waiting, the parts truck is late, and somebody is on hold. If it works then, it works.
Questions go straight to us.
Whether it is a shop looking at ShopBase, a developer who wants the labor time API, or a parent sizing up Cullinan Academy, the same inbox answers all three.