Why I don't use Jobber

Jobber is the obvious answer if you're running field service work and you want software. Housecall Pro is the other obvious answer. ServiceTitan if you're bigger. All three are competent, well-funded, full-featured products. Their teams are talented. Their docs are good. Their support is fast.

I don't use any of them. I built Mour instead. This post is the honest version of why.

Jobber is a great product. For someone else.

If I had three trucks, two dispatched crews, a quoting workflow with up-sells, payroll integration, employee time-tracking, GPS-on-vehicles, and a quarterly business review with a customer success manager — Jobber would be the right answer. Their product earns its sticker price. The team has built something genuinely impressive over a decade.

The problem isn't that Jobber is bad. The problem is that Jobber is sized for a category I'm not in.

I'm one truck. One phone. Forty residential clients. My "dispatcher" is the back of my mind on the drive over. My "payroll integration" is paying myself. My "employee time-tracking" is looking at the clock when I'm done.

Most of Jobber's product surface is for the operational complexity that emerges when you have employees. Crew assignment. Job-cost tracking. Multi-user permissions. Customer service inbox. Sales pipeline. Quoting. Up-sells. All real features that real businesses need. None of which I need.

The pricing reflects this. Jobber's paid plans are priced for teams, and even the entry plan is a meaningful line item at a solo operator's revenue — a real percentage of a one-person software budget. (Check getjobber.com for current numbers — SaaS pricing moves.)

I'd happily pay for a tool that did the slice of what Jobber does that a one-person business actually needs — as long as it was the right slice. There's nothing in the market that's specifically that. (There's good general-purpose software that comes close, but none of it fit a one-person route the way I needed.)

The 20% that matters to me

If I sit down and write out what a one-person field service app actually has to do, well:

Tell me what I'm doing today. An inbox of jobs in chronological or geographic order with ETAs. Tap to start, tap to finish.
Remember my clients. Names, addresses, services, prices, history. Not a CRM — just an address book that does this one job well.
Auto-schedule the recurring stuff. Karen is bi-weekly Tuesdays. I shouldn't have to put that on a calendar every two weeks for the rest of my career.
Let me snap a photo when I'm done. For receipts, before-and-after, dispute resolution.
Send the client a heads-up SMS. "Heading over now." "All done." Maybe a reminder the day before. Not marketing — just operational.
Optimize my route on the days that fill up. Not every day. Not three optimization algorithms to pick from. One. The good one.
Send an invoice when work is done. Email it. Mark it paid when paid. Don't try to process the payment — I already use Venmo and Stripe and that's fine.
Stay out of my way. No upsell modals. No "tour" loops. No customer success manager calling me on a Tuesday at 2pm.

That's most of it.

What I don't want

Equally important — what I'd actively pay to NOT have:

No crew dispatching. I'm the crew. There is no dispatch.
No client-facing portal. My customers don't want to log in to a website to see their invoices. They want me to text them the amount. (Mour does send the email; they can also just reply to me.)
No clutter I didn't ask for. I know my route. I know my customers. The app stays out of the way and lets me work.
No quoting workflow. I quote in 30 seconds on the phone. I don't need a workflow.
No expense tracking. That's QuickBooks' job, not Mour's job.
No marketing automation I didn't ask for. Mour added optional upsell and reacquisition nudges on Professional — off by default. I leave them off; they're there if you ever want them.
No employee timesheets, GPS tracking, or geofencing. Same.
No quarterly business review. Same.

So why not just… not use software at all?

I tried. Paper notebook for the schedule, Google Calendar reminders for recurrences, Venmo for payments, Pixel camera roll for photos, Apple Notes for client info, Apple Mail for invoices.

It works fine at 5 clients. It's painful at 15. It fell apart at 25. The breakdowns were always the same:

Schedule conflicts — double-booking Tuesday morning because two reminders fired at once.
Dropped clients — Karen's recurrence was set up wrong six months ago and I'd been missing every fourth visit.
Disputed work — "I came home and the back wasn't mowed" without a photo in the camera roll I could find quickly.
Late invoices — emailing one-by-one from Mail took 45 minutes I didn't have on a Sunday night.

So I built Mour. Because the cost of NOT having software at 30+ clients was higher than the cost of having software. But "software" sized to my actual operation was the gap.

How Mour compares

Honestly:

Jobber, Housecall Pro, ServiceTitan — full-featured, enterprise-grade, optimized for crews. Better than Mour if you're a crew. Worse than Mour if you're solo, because most of the product surface is in your way.
Tradify, ServiceM8, BuilderTrend — somewhere in the middle. Capable, but typically priced for crews and feature-loaded for crews.
Spreadsheets — works fine to 10 clients. Falls apart at 25. Cheap.
Calendar + Notes + Venmo — same as spreadsheets.
Mour — small, opinionated, and free to try with real limits. Built for one-person operations specifically. See current limits and pricing on the pricing page.

Pick the one that fits. If Jobber fits you, use Jobber — they've earned their position. If Mour fits, great. If a spreadsheet fits, even better — you're saving money you can put back into the business.

Who Mour is for

Mour is built for one person, or a very small operation. If you run a crew, the bigger platforms are the right call — Mour stays focused on the person doing the work.

If Mour ever feels like Jobber, I've made a mistake. It's meant to stay focused on one person running one truck — that's the whole point.

Try it

Download Mour. Free on the free plan, real limits. If it fits, great. If not, no hard feelings — use the tool that does fit.

Email me at founder@mour.app any time. I read every email.