Rather than building a generic tool and pointing it at tree companies, which is how most of the software in this trade got made.
TreePro is built by Lehvel. We build and run the web presence for local service businesses, tree companies among them, and that work is where this product came from.
Tree care turned out to be a harder and more interesting problem than the rest of it. The stakes are higher. The pricing is genuinely difficult and depends on things a form does not ask about. The gap in trust between a good crew and a guy with a pickup is enormous and almost invisible from the outside. And the tools available were built by people who have never had to work out where a drop zone is.
So rather than shipping a template, we spent the time to learn how the work is actually priced, what the standards are, and where the money leaks. That research is what the product is built on, and a fair amount of it is published in the field guide because it is worth something to somebody pricing a job tonight.
Arboriculture has a documented risk assessment method and written work and safety standards. Most of what software needs to be careful about is already specified; it just has not been encoded.
Public review sites and trade forums are unusually candid about what the existing tools do to people. Several product decisions here came straight out of complaints written by people who had paid for something else.
Sites, local search, intake, reviews and the machine-readable layer underneath them. That was already our work before any of this, which is why it is the half TreePro covers.
| Thing | Status |
|---|---|
| Research into the trade | Done. Forums, trade press, software reviews, consumer guidance, standards. Published where it is useful. |
| Product and design direction | Done. Architecture, the knowledge layer, three surfaces, the safety boundaries. |
| This website | You're reading it. Built in public, with the log kept honestly. |
| The software | Being built now, starting with the intake. |
| TreePro customers | None yet. Early access is a short list, not a launch. |
| Results to point at | None. There will be nothing in this row until there is. |
It would take ten minutes to fill this table with things that sound better, and everyone in this category does. The reason not to is that the first crews who try this will already have been sold to by somebody with a better-looking page than ours, and it did not work out for them.
When there are numbers, they will be real ones, with permission on file.
Most of what separates a good assessment from a bad one is not intuition. It is knowing which defects matter given what is underneath them, what the season permits, and what the access allows.
That is structured knowledge. It has a documented method behind it, it can be encoded with the reasoning attached, and once it is, it works on every job rather than on the ones a single experienced person happens to look at.
That is the actual product. The website is how it reaches people, and the front office is how it pays for itself in the meantime.
Especially if you think we have something wrong. A lot of what is on this site came from operators telling somebody exactly that and being ignored.