A Google Sheet with customer names, addresses, and "Monday / Wednesday / Friday" columns. A notebook in your truck with gate codes. Your phone calendar with route reminders. Sound familiar?
Everything the sheet held, plus everything it couldn’t do: route-ordered days, automatic SMS reminders, per-yard records with dogs and gate codes, photo proof of service, and monthly card billing that chases itself.
Free up to 15 customers — which means the upgrade costs nothing exactly when you are small enough to wonder if you need it.
The honest trade: it is one more login. The sheet never asked you to sign in — it just also never texted a customer or charged a card.
Free, familiar, infinitely flexible — and genuinely fine at 10–20 customers. Every scoop business should probably start here; the discipline of keeping the sheet IS learning the business.
Where it breaks: no route optimization, no automated reminders, no payment tracking, no proof of service, no reporting — and every one of those gaps becomes your unpaid evening job as the route grows.
Not on day one — a sheet and a calendar genuinely work up to about 20–30 customers. The tipping point is when route planning, reminder texts, and payment tracking start eating your evenings, or when the first missed yard or unpaid month costs you a customer. Software earns its place when the sheet starts costing you money.
About ten minutes for the basics: sign up, import your customer CSV, and confirm the weekly schedule the import wizard proposes. The first route you run from your phone is usually the same day — there is no implementation phase to schedule.
Yes — that is the front door. The import wizard maps your columns (names, addresses, phones, service day, frequency, even dog counts and gate codes), then rebuilds weekly schedules and monthly billing plans from what it finds. Your sheet becomes the seed, not wasted work.
Free means free up to 15 customers: $0 today, no trial clock, no feature wall on the parts that matter. Past 15, it is a flat published $47/month — never per user. The bet is simple: run your first season free, and pay only when the route has outgrown the tier.
Order your day for driving, text every customer a reminder without you typing it, attach a gate-closed photo to each visit, charge the card on file every month, and flag who has quietly gone unpaid. A sheet records what you tell it; a CRM does the telling.
Your sheet imports in one pass — customers, days, frequencies, gate codes. Ten minutes from now the route can be planning itself.
Start free