Timestamped service proof for snow contractors

The idea

Slip-and-fall claims arrive two or three years after the storm, and the contractor who plowed the lot at 4am has nothing but a line in an invoice to prove it. Insurers settle claims that should be fought because there is no evidence, premiums climb, and some contractors get dropped entirely. The industry standard for documentation is a text message with a blurry photo, if that.

Field-service platforms do dispatch and invoicing; none of them produce litigation-grade evidence, which is a different product with different requirements: tamper-evident stamps, weather at time of service, and an export a lawyer can actually use. Capture has to be two taps in the cold with gloves on, or crews will not do it.

Who pays

The contractor-owner pays $39/month during the season, and the framing is insurance defence rather than admin software: one dismissed claim pays for a decade of subscription, and some insurers already discount premiums for documented service. The buyer runs 1 to 5 trucks. Distribution is snow and ice management associations (SIMA), contractor Facebook groups, and insurance brokers who serve the trade and benefit from clients having records.

MVP scope

• Property list with GPS auto-selection of the nearest site
• Two-tap before/after capture stamped with GPS, time, crew member, and fetched weather
• Offline photo queue with background retry upload
• Visit history per property and a one-click PDF evidence packet per property per storm
• Photo hashing and void-only (no delete) record policy
• Skip for v1: dispatch, routing, invoicing, customer portals, and Android/iOS feature divergence beyond Expo defaults

Build PlowProof, a mobile evidence-capture app for snow removal contractors. Stack: React Native with Expo (managed workflow), Supabase (Postgres, auth, storage), Stripe for subscriptions, plus a minimal Next.js or Expo web admin for the owner.

Core flow: the owner sets up a property list (name, address, geocoded pin, service notes). A crew member opens the app at a site, and the app auto-selects the nearest property from GPS. Two big buttons: BEFORE and AFTER. Each tap opens the camera, and every photo is stamped server-side with GPS coordinates, timestamp, crew member ID, and weather pulled at capture time from the Open-Meteo API (temperature, precipitation, snowfall). Photos upload in the background and queue offline, since sites often have no signal; use an on-device queue that retries until confirmed.

Screens: property list sorted by distance, capture screen, visit history per property, owner dashboard, settings. The owner web view adds one killer feature: a one-click PDF evidence packet for a chosen property and date range, containing every visit with photos, stamps, and weather, formatted for handing to an insurer or lawyer.

Non-obvious details: hash each photo (SHA-256) at upload and print the hash on the PDF so tampering claims can be rebutted; never allow deleting a visit, only voiding with a logged reason.

Pricing: $39/month per company in-season, unlimited crews and properties, pause allowed off-season.