Here's the honest version. We work with dozens of small and mid-size trade businesses — cleaning crews, IT shops, contractors, landscapers, and more. We get it because we come from a family of the same trades: crews to dispatch, invoices to chase, clients texting at all hours, and not a lot of patience for software that makes simple things complicated.
We watched the businesses we work with try the big all-in-one accounting suites ($80/mo and up — overkill, English-only, clearly built for accountants, not crews), the job-scheduling apps ($49/mo and climbing — fine for one language, but plenty of crews and clients speak Spanish), and the spreadsheet phase. At some point we just started building our own software.
"It had to work in English and Spanish, run fast on a phone, and not require a training manual. That was the whole requirement."
SUITE started as an internal tool for one of the businesses in our family — invoices, client notes, job scheduling. Then we added estimates, then proposals, then accounting. When it started working well enough that they stopped using anything else, we figured it was worth opening up to everyone else living the same day-to-day.
One of the businesses we work with expanded into Puerto Vallarta, which meant dealing with Mexican tax requirements, peso pricing, and IMSS documentation on top of everything else. That's why SUITE handles MX tax logic, MXN pricing, and bilingual client-facing documents — not because we thought it'd be a good market feature, but because a real business actually needed it.
On the "AI-generated" question — fair thing to wonder. The backend is Python / FastAPI / SQLite. The frontend is vanilla JavaScript, no framework. We run it on infrastructure we own and operate. The architecture decisions came from running an actual business with it, not from a prompt. Does AI help us write and improve code faster? Yes. Does that make the decisions behind it any less real? No.
