Why a software company gives away 21 free places
Short answer: a free place is a trade. We are not giving away software out of goodwill — we are buying something we cannot get any other way, which is a small number of working tradespeople using the thing every day and telling us the truth about it. Knowing what we are buying is the fastest way to work out whether the deal suits you.
What a software company actually lacks early on
The hard part of building admin software is not the code. It is knowing what a real working week looks like. How a quote gets described when you are standing in someone’s kitchen with a tape measure in one hand. What a receipt looks like after a fortnight in a hot van. Which bit of a job someone bothers to log at 6pm and which bit they never will.
None of that is available to buy. The only way to get it is to put the software in front of people who have real admin and watch what survives contact.
Why 21 and not 2,100
Because the thing we need back is attention, and attention does not scale. With twenty-odd people we can read every message, fix the thing that annoyed you the same day, and actually remember which of you is a gas engineer and which is a sparky. At two thousand we would be running a support queue and triaging tickets, which is a different activity entirely and produces worse software early on.
Small numbers also keep us honest. If three of twenty-one people say the quote PDF looks wrong on a phone, that is 14% of the entire user base and impossible to ignore. The same three out of two thousand disappears into a dashboard.
What the deal is, plainly
There are 21 Founding Tradies places on GraftG. A place gets you twelve months free on the Pro plan with no card taken, and then half price for life, applied automatically when the free period ends. There are two other routes to a founding place: a thirty-second video testimonial that we actually end up using makes it free for life, and so does referring five tradies who stick around and pay.
What we ask in return is deliberately small, because anything bigger would not get done. Two honest lines after a month about what changed. Bug reports if you feel like sending them. That is the whole obligation.
What it costs us, and why we do it anyway
Twenty-one Pro accounts at nothing for a year, then half price indefinitely, is real money forgone. The reason it is still a good trade is that the alternative is worse: building for twelve months on assumptions, launching to silence, and discovering the thing nobody mentioned was that half of you never open email.
It is the same logic as any early-stage pricing decision, and we have written about the equivalent arithmetic from the buyer’s side in whether a new tool will pay for itself. Early on, information is worth more than revenue. Later it reverses. We are early.
What this should tell you as a buyer
A free beta place is a signal about stage, not about quality. It tells you the software is new enough that feedback is worth more to the maker than your subscription. That is genuinely good news if you want influence over how a tool works, and genuinely bad news if you want something that has already been shaken down by thousands of people.
The honest framing we use on the offer page is the one we will use here: it is early, and you will hit rough edges. The deal is that you tell us on WhatsApp and we fix them fast — usually the same day. If that sounds like a reasonable bargain, it probably is one for you. If it sounds like a liability, that is also useful information, and we would rather you worked it out now.
Who we are
GraftG and Grafto are both Green & Home Ltd, a real UK trading business that builds software for its own operations and then sells it. We have written about how that came about, which is relevant here mostly because it means we are not a studio chasing a round — we are a business that will still be here next year regardless of how this goes.
If you want one of the places
They are for working tradies with real admin — ideally five or more jobs a week. Plumbers, gas engineers and electricians first; builders and decorators close behind. Details, and the application, are on the Founding Tradies page, and there is a plain-English overview of what GraftG does on our GraftG page.
Questions, or want a tool we don't have yet? Email hello@grafto.co.uk — a real person replies.