Comparison
Lonehelm vs Buildertrend. A flat-rate watcher, not a per-seat ERP.
Buildertrend is built around a per-seat rate card and a feature set that scales with the plan you buy; Lonehelm is built around the one- and two-person crew and the watch surfaces that crew actually needs. The table below names the differences a small residential GC feels in the first invoice and the first month. Lonehelm is the always-on watch for one- and two-person residential GCs running 10–20 active jobs.
Side by side
Five rows. The differences a McKinney GC feels in month one.
The table below is the short read. The long version is the price card, the Friday inbox, and the morning after an inspection shifts on the city’s calendar. Scroll horizontally on small screens.
| Feature | LonehelmA nightly watcher. | BuildertrendA per-seat ERP. |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Flat subscription keyed to the shop, not the headcount. $75 – $749 per month with no per-seat creep as you add a lead super or a spouse on the project board. | Per-seat pricing that climbs with every user you add — the office manager, the second super, the spouse doing invoicing. The published tiers run from roughly $99 up to $399+ per month and the headline number rarely matches the invoice. |
| AI superintendent monitoring | Native nightly watcher built in. The agent compares the schedule you record against the schedule the jobs actually ran and surfaces the one or two items that drifted. | AI is bolted on through third-party integrations — Joist, CoConstruct wrappers, and add-on schedulers. You wire the integrations yourself and pay again for each one to behave like a watcher. |
| Automated homeowner updates | Every Friday the agent drafts a clean photo-and-milestone recap from the field uploads and trade notes. You approve or edit before it goes out — the agent never sends on your behalf. | Homeowner updates are a manual surface — you write, format, and send through the portal yourself. There is no draft-and-approve loop, no weekly cadence, no first-pass from a watch agent. |
| Permit & inspection watching | Permit expirations tracked to the day, with a 30-day renewal flag. Rough-in, insulation, and final inspections watched against the project schedule, with a 72-hour reschedule-risk flag. | Permit and inspection tracking is a manual entry on the project schedule. The system surfaces what you entered — it does not flag expiry windows or reschedule risk against the city’s calendar. |
| Support scope | A person writes back, usually the same day. Trade and county are routed to the founder directly — never a marketing sequence, never a tier-1 chatbot. | Support is gated by plan tier. The lowest tier is largely self-serve through a knowledge base; phone and chat support scale up only on the upper tiers, often with a per-incident cost attached. |
Who it's built for
One- and two-person family-run builders.
Lonehelm is built around the shop where the inbox, the voicemail, and the daily log are already the operating system — and where a $300-per-seat jump is the difference between keeping the lead super on the project board and rolling the schedule back to a spreadsheet. Three shapes we hear most often:
Owner-operator + one lead super
You estimate, schedule, and bill from the kitchen table; your lead super runs ten jobs a day and posts the daily log from the truck. The inbox is the project manager and the permit renewal is the item you almost missed last week.
Husband-and-wife crew with regular subs
You wear both hats — sales on Tuesday, walkthrough on Thursday, draw request on Friday. Your subs have been with you five years and they post when they remember; the homeowner email is the part that always slips another day.
Second-generation builder running 10–14 jobs
You inherited the customer list and the estimating template, not a project manager. The watch was always your dad, who is two years from retirement and finally ready to hand the rough-in calendar to a tool.
Get on the list
We're onboarding the first ten residential-GC crews this fall.
Leave your name and email on the waitlist form and we'll write back as soon as a slot opens for your shop. Tell us which trades you run and which county you build in — we'll match you to onboarding, not the other way around.
Prefer the inbox? lonehelm@polsia.app with a paragraph about your shop, and a person writes back.
Comparison current as of August 2026 — Buildertrend features and pricing change; we re-check this page quarterly.
Still deciding? Read the FAQ →