The festival committee has no budget. What would that even cost?
Less than people expect, because the scope is narrow and we only build it once. A single application path with payment and certificate collection is a small fixed-price project, and a lot of committees split it with the city or a sponsor. If a plain event registration product would do it for a few hundred dollars a year, we will point you there instead — that happens more often than not.
Our chair changes every couple of years and everything gets lost. Can software fix that?
Partly, and it is the most valuable thing it does here. Where the power drops are in Central Park, which side of the square the car show fills first, who at the fire station on North Magnolia has the keys — if all of that lives in one account rather than on one person's laptop, a handover becomes a login rather than an archaeology project. We set the accounts up in the organisation's name for exactly that reason.
We do storm work. Does anything you build help with insurers?
Indirectly, and the mechanism is dull: photographs, dated, attached to a property and a scope, taken before the work rather than remembered after. Most disputes we see are not about honesty, they are about evidence. We do not deal with carriers on your behalf and we would not build anything that tries to.
Would this work for a farm that is also a trucking outfit and rents ground?
That combination is normal here and it is exactly why an off-the-shelf farm product often does not fit. We build the join — the same load, the same field, the same landlord agreement visible from whichever side you are working on that day — rather than three systems that each know a third of the story.
What happens to everything we have put in if we stop paying you?
It stays where it is and it is yours. Vendor histories, job files, farm records and photographs all come out in ordinary formats on request, and the accounts are in the name of your business or your committee, never ours. A town that rebuilt its own city hall does not need another dependency, and we would not want to be one.
Do you use AI for everything you build?
No, and we will tell you where it is not worth it. Reading a stack of insurance certificates for expiry dates, or pulling the fields off a delivery slip — that is worth doing with a model. Taking a booth payment, printing a roster or scheduling a crew is plain code, cheaper and more predictable, and that is how we would build it.
How much of our time does this take while you are building it?
A couple of hours at the start to map the process properly, then short check-ins. The mapping session is the part we will not shortcut, because it is where we find out that your vendor fair and your car show are not actually the same process. After that, we would rather you were farming.
When is the wrong time to start?
April, if the build is for June. Anything meant to carry the festival wants to be finished and rehearsed a good six weeks out, so a conversation in the winter is the right one. For farm and trade work there is no bad season, though most people would rather map a process in February than in October.