Solo HVAC and Electrical Techs Juggle Parts Across 3 Vans With No App Built for It

Executive Summary:

• Solo and small trade contractors (HVAC, electrical, plumbing, locksmith, appliance repair) running 1-5 service vans still track parts inventory on paper or spreadsheets, with no purpose-built app for treating each van as its own warehouse
• A March 2026 Reddit thread cross-posted to r/InventoryManagement and r/FieldService shows a service manager overseeing ~20 technicians asking for exactly this feature set, and getting only partial-fit workarounds in response
• The pricing gap sits below eTurns ($40-79 per vehicle/mo) and above "just use a spreadsheet," with Sortly's meaningful tiers starting at $49/mo and Ply requiring an enterprise sales call
• Recommended pricing: flat $19-79/mo across three tiers (Solo/Crew/Fleet) based on vans and users, not per-vehicle fees
• Revenue potential: $2.85K-$19K MRR across conservative (Month 6) to optimistic (Month 24) scenarios; MVP buildable by one developer in 5-8 weeks

The Problem & Opportunity

Solo and small trade contractors, the HVAC techs, electricians, plumbers, locksmiths, and appliance repair pros who run one to five service vans, still track their parts inventory the way their industry has tracked it for thirty years: on paper, in a notebook clipped to the dash, or in a spreadsheet that gets updated "when there's time." That never happens on a busy week, and it shows up as a stalled job, a wasted supply run, or a tech who shows up to a fix without the one part the job needed. This report lays out a purpose-built, flat-rate inventory tracker that treats every van as its own warehouse location, something the current market either overbuilds into an enterprise sale or underbuilds into a generic photo-catalog app.

⚠️ Honest take: The biggest risk here isn't that the problem is fake, it's that Sortly already has barcode scanning and folder-based location tracking on its $49/mo Advanced plan, and a determined product manager there could reposition it as a "trades" vertical with a landing page and a pricing tweak. What's protected this niche so far is that Sortly, eTurns, and Ply have all chosen to either stay horizontal or go upmarket into enterprise sales calls, leaving a gap below eTurns' $40-79 per-vehicle fee and above "just use a spreadsheet." See the Devil's Advocate section below for the full incumbent-risk breakdown before you commit to building this.

🎯 The Opportunity

Every solo trade contractor with more than one van faces the same operational blind spot: they cannot see, in real time, what parts are sitting in which vehicle. A plumber with two vans doesn't know if the second van has a working water heater thermocouple until someone drives over and physically checks. An HVAC tech running three trucks reorders capacitors for all three when only one is actually low, because there's no per-van visibility. This is not a hypothetical problem. In a March 2026 Reddit thread cross-posted to r/InventoryManagement and r/FieldService, a service manager overseeing about twenty technicians with vans stocked with expensive fire alarm parts asked for exactly this: a mobile app for technicians, desktop access for the office, the ability to treat each van as its own warehouse, barcode scanning against existing manufacturer barcodes, and QuickBooks integration. The responses pointed to workaround tools, not a dedicated product built for this exact job.

The opportunity sits in a specific gap: below eTurns, which charges $40 to $79 per vehicle per month and stacks a separate stockroom fee on top, and above "just wing it with a spreadsheet." A solo operator with two or three vans on eTurns is paying $80 to $237 a month just for inventory visibility, which is more than most solo operators pay for their entire scheduling and invoicing stack combined. Sortly's cheapest paid tier that includes meaningful job-linking (5 active jobs, unlimited QR labels) is $49/mo retail, dropping to $24/mo only on a first-year annual promotional rate that reverts to a smaller ongoing discount after year one. Ply, the most trade-specific of the group, doesn't publish pricing at all and requires a sales call, with its own blog stating enterprise deployments run $500 to $2,000+ per month. There is real room for a flat $15 to $29 per month tool that does one thing extremely well: shows a solo operator or small crew exactly what's on each van, right now, from a phone.

This is a Vertical Opportunity combined with a Pricing Gap. The vertical angle is that trade contractors have specific, recurring needs (barcode scan against existing manufacturer SKUs, transfer stock between vans, flag low stock before a job gets blocked) that a horizontal tool like Sortly or Zoho Inventory treats as an afterthought inside a much bigger feature set built for warehouses and retail. The pricing angle is that the two vendors who do understand trades, Ply and eTurns, have priced themselves for larger operations with dedicated office staff, not the one-person shop running two trucks out of a driveway.

👤 Ideal Customer Profile

The ideal customer is a solo trade contractor or a two-to-five-person crew running one to five service vehicles, most commonly in HVAC, electrical, plumbing, locksmithing, or appliance repair. This person owns the business, drives one of the vans themselves, and handles their own purchasing decisions without an IT department or procurement committee involved. They are price-sensitive but not cheap: they already pay for scheduling software, accounting software, and often a basic CRM, so they understand recurring SaaS costs and are comfortable adding one more tool if it clearly saves time or prevents lost jobs.

This contractor's current inventory process is one of three things: a paper log kept in the glovebox, a shared Google Sheet that one person updates inconsistently, or nothing at all, relying purely on memory and periodically "eyeballing" the van. All three break down the same way: as the business grows from one van to two or three, nobody has full visibility into what's where, and the owner either overspends on redundant stock across vans or loses a job because the right part was fifteen minutes away in the wrong truck. The trigger moment for buying is almost always adding a second van or a second technician, the point at which "I just know what's in my truck" stops being true.

Secondary buyers include small field service agencies managing five to twenty vans for a franchise-style rollup, appliance repair chains with regional coverage, and specialty trades like low-voltage electrical installers who carry expensive, easily-misplaced components. These buyers have slightly higher budgets and may eventually need the Ply-style procurement and RFQ tooling, but they still start at the same entry point: knowing what's in each vehicle, in real time, from a phone.

🔥 Why Now

Two forces are converging to make this the right moment to build a van-stock tracker. First, parts cost volatility and supply chain unpredictability that started in 2023 and has continued into 2025 and 2026 has pushed more solo trade operators to carry more stock per van as insurance against delays, which makes the cost of poor visibility (over-ordering, duplicate stock across vans, stockouts on the wrong truck) higher than it was five years ago. When a capacitor or a thermocouple might be back-ordered for two weeks, knowing exactly what's already on hand across all vans becomes a real cost-saving decision, not a nice-to-have.

Second, and more concretely, the March 2026 Reddit thread cited above shows active, current demand with a highly specific feature list that nobody has fully answered. The fact that a fire-alarm service manager with twenty technicians got recommendations for four different partial-fit tools (Sortly, Fishbowl, Digit, and a WordPress-based workaround called Stokkap) rather than one obvious answer confirms this gap is real and unresolved as of this writing, not a stale problem that got quietly solved by an existing vendor sometime in the last year.

There is also a quieter structural tailwind: mobile barcode scanning via a phone camera has become good enough in the last few years that a solo dev no longer needs to bundle a hardware scanner or build custom computer vision to ship a usable scan-to-count workflow. That technical barrier, which used to justify higher prices from incumbents who bundled proprietary scanners, has largely disappeared, which is part of why a lean, flat-rate app can now undercut eTurns' per-vehicle pricing model without cutting corners on the core experience.

📊 Validation & Proof

The clearest validation is the Reddit thread itself: a real operations manager, managing real inventory (fire alarm parts, which are neither cheap nor abundant), publicly described the exact product spec this report proposes and did not get a clean answer. That same request was independently echoed across multiple, unrelated trade subreddits. In r/Locksmith, a solo operator described running inventory through a self-built Google AppSheet system and explicitly asked for something more advanced, while another commenter in the same thread reported paying almost $100 a month on QuickBooks Online just to get basic inventory tracking bolted onto their accounting software, a clear signal that the market is currently paying accounting-software prices for a job that a dedicated $19-29/mo tool could do better and cheaper. A third commenter in that same thread confirmed that plain spreadsheets remain "the most cost effective" option they've found, underscoring that nothing affordable and purpose-built currently exists for this specific buyer.

In r/ApplianceTechTalk, appliance repair technicians independently agreed that tracking truck stock is "absolutely key for efficiency" and that a service vehicle needs to be treated as its own tracked stock location, echoing the exact mental model (van as warehouse) that this product is built around. In r/HVAC, a long-running thread about managing truck stock shows technicians relying on manual counts or bolting inventory onto QuickBooks through third-party field-management add-ons, again with no dedicated, affordable, purpose-built answer surfacing. A separate thread in r/software from an electrical installation company owner describes the exact failure mode this product prevents: installers pulling parts on the way out, borrowing from other vans, and reconciling later, which causes inventory accuracy to "die fast," alongside a clear feature wishlist (issue-to-job tracking, mobile pick lists, barcode scanning, van-to-job transfers) that maps almost one-to-one onto this product's MVP scope.

On the revenue-proof side, Ply's own marketing states its platform has processed more than 100,000 purchase orders, tracked 2.8 million materials, and stocked more than 5,300 trucks, which confirms that trade contractors are already paying real money for van and truck inventory tools at scale, even though Ply's own pricing sits well above what a solo operator would choose to pay. The broader field service management software market is valued at $5.66 billion in 2025 by Mordor Intelligence, growing to $9.87 billion by 2031 at a 9.54% compound annual growth rate, of which inventory and parts management is one of the core recurring feature categories customers pay for.

The Market

The competitive landscape for van and truck inventory tools splits cleanly into three tiers: generic inventory apps that were never built for trades, trade-specific tools priced for larger operations, and dedicated van-stock platforms that charge per vehicle in a way that punishes small fleets. Understanding exactly where each incumbent sits, and where they all leave a gap, is the foundation for positioning a new entrant correctly.

🏆 Competitive Landscape

Sortly is the closest thing to a household name in small-business inventory tracking, and it is genuinely well-built: photo-based cataloging, barcode and QR code scanning from any phone camera, folder-based organization that can mirror physical locations like trucks or job sites, and an "active jobs" concept that lets you connect items to work orders. Its free tier covers 100 unique items, 1 user, and 2 active jobs, which is too thin for a working trade business with more than a handful of SKUs. The Advanced tier at $49/mo (discounted to $24/mo for a new customer's first year only, then $49/mo full annual rate going forward) covers 500 unique items, 2 user licenses, and 5 active jobs with unlimited QR code label creation. The Ultra tier jumps to $149/mo (or $74/mo first-year annual) for 2,000 items, 5 users, 10 active jobs, and barcode label creation plus purchase orders. Reviewers on Trustpilot describe the pricing model as feeling like a bait-and-switch: the free trial experience is simple and appealing, but the paid tiers feel expensive relative to what you get, and several reviewers specifically call out aggressive post-signup price increases. Capterra reviewers separately flag that Sortly lacks dual price fields (purchase cost versus resale price) and that sync or lag issues appear once inventories grow larger, both signs the product's roots are in general asset cataloging, not high-frequency trade parts tracking.

Ply is the most philosophically aligned competitor: it is explicitly built for trades, prices by number of stock locations (trucks plus warehouses) rather than by seat, and includes unlimited users on every plan, which is a smart model for a field-heavy business. The problem for a solo operator is access and price: Ply does not publish pricing anywhere on its site, requiring a sales call to "count your trucks and warehouses" before quoting a number. Ply's own blog content states that enterprise-tier inventory software for large-scale contractors "typically starts at $500 per month and can easily exceed $2,000," which, even allowing for its lower Starter tier being cheaper than its Enterprise tier, signals a product built and sold for businesses with dedicated procurement staff, not a single plumber running two vans.

eTurns is the most direct existing competitor in terms of positioning (it explicitly markets a "service truck inventory" product) but its pricing model actively punishes small fleets. eTurns charges separately per vehicle and per stockroom, with vehicle plans running from a Replenish tier at $40/month per vehicle up to an Optimize tier at $79/month per vehicle, billed semi-annually, and stockroom plans running from $40/month up to $399/month per stockroom depending on tier, also billed semi-annually. A solo operator with three vans on even the cheapest eTurns vehicle tier would pay $120/month before adding a single stockroom, which is four to eight times the price point this report proposes. Capterra reviewers who switched to eTurns from a prior vendor cite that vendor's high cost and clumsy operation as their reason for switching, but current eTurns users report the app "does not update count automatically when receiving orders in desktop to phone app," a workflow gap that a purpose-built mobile-first tool could avoid. G2's aggregated negative-review tags for eTurns include slow performance, poor interface design, and navigation difficulty.

Zoho Inventory is a capable, well-priced general inventory platform (Free tier for very light use, Standard at $29/mo, Professional at $79/mo, Premium at $129/mo, Enterprise at $249/mo, all billed annually) but it was built for e-commerce and retail order fulfillment, not for job-linked van stock. It has no concept of "issue this part to today's job" the way a trade-specific tool needs, and additional stock locations beyond a plan's included count cost an extra $10/month add-on each, which adds up quickly for a contractor managing three or four separate vans as locations.

FieldPulse and Digit round out the field, and both illustrate the same pattern from a different angle: they bundle inventory into a much larger, more expensive platform. FieldPulse's inventory feature lives inside a full field-service management suite priced around $89/month base plus roughly $30/month per user, and third-party review site fieldcamp.ai reports that add-ons can push a five-technician team's annual cost past $17,000, an enormous ask for a business that just wants to know what's on its trucks. Digit (recently rebranded as Sutton) targets mid-sized businesses at $200 to $700 per month, plus $50/month per additional user and $100/month per integration, according to its own features page, putting it entirely out of reach for the solo-to-five-van buyer this report targets.

🌊 Blue Ocean Strategy

The blue ocean here is narrow but real: build the one thing every incumbent either buries inside a bigger, pricier platform or fails to price accessibly, a dead-simple, flat-rate, mobile-first tool where each van is a named location, every item has a quantity per location, barcode scanning works against existing manufacturer barcodes without requiring custom label printing, and low-stock alerts fire per van, not just globally. Do not try to out-feature Ply on procurement and RFQ management, and do not try to out-feature FieldPulse on scheduling and invoicing. Those are both losing battles against well-funded, more mature products. Instead, win on being the tool a solo operator can set up in fifteen minutes on their phone, for $19 a month flat regardless of how many items they track, with QuickBooks sync as the one integration that actually matters to this buyer.

The wedge feature that no competitor fully nails is van-to-van and van-to-job transfers with a clean audit trail: a technician scans a part out of Van A, the app confirms it landed on today's job for Customer X, and the office can see in real time which van is now short a part and needs restocking before tomorrow's run. Ply comes closest conceptually but locks this behind an enterprise sales process; Sortly's "active jobs" feature exists but was clearly designed for general asset tracking, not high-frequency parts consumption. Owning this specific workflow, cheaply, for the smallest end of the market that every other vendor treats as a starter tier they'll eventually try to upsell, is the entire strategy.