I'm a dealership mechanic building an invoicing app for side work — here's the rate data behind it

By day I'm a technician at a dealership. Like most guys in the trades, I've always had side work — and I got tired of pricing jobs on napkins and chasing payment over text. So I built SideWRK: estimating and invoicing that works the way each trade actually bills.

That last part turned into the most interesting research of the project. Hourly billing only fits about 5 of the 42 trades I built for. Roofers bid by the "square" (100 sq ft), fence guys by the linear foot, junk removal by the fraction of a truckload, dent repair guys literally price by coin size — nickel, quarter, half dollar. Quote in the wrong unit and you underbid every time.

We published the whole dataset free: sidewrk.app/side-work-rates — billing unit, typical rate, and labor share (what % of the ticket you keep vs. pass to parts) for all 42 trades.

Where the business is: product's live, one real trialing user, ads just spun up, zero-authority SEO doing zero-authority things. Distribution is the whole fight. Happy to answer anything about building for blue-collar users — they're the best and most honest user base I've ever built for.