The customer pain was one of those problems that's easy to overlook because everyone just accepts it: contractors manually maintaining their pricebooks. Equipment costs shift constantly, supplier catalogs change, and most contractors either spend hours updating prices or, more often, stop updating entirely and sell off stale numbers. That means they're either losing margin or losing bids, and they don't always know which.

The product question was whether we could eliminate the maintenance burden without changing the experience contractors already knew. We didn't want to rebuild the pricebook UI. We wanted to make the data behind it smarter. By integrating a third-party data platform with our own middleware, we connected pricebooks to live supplier pricing and territory-specific product catalogs. Prices stay current automatically, and the products a contractor sees reflect what they actually sell in their market. The bigger unlock was what happens downstream: accurate pricebook data now flows directly into homeowner-facing proposals with good/better/best comparisons, so a contractor's pricing structure becomes their selling tool. The feasibility challenge was stitching together external data, internal logic, and a user-facing output that felt seamless without disrupting existing workflows.