The broken promises of legacy tech.

We started on Joist, which did estimates and invoices and nothing else. When we needed scheduling we moved to Jobber. Jobber stopped fitting, so we went to Houzz Pro — which we had to buy the Pro plan for anyway in order to advertise with them.

Houzz Pro's change orders were complicated. The reports came out wrong. Onboarding was three separate 45-minute sessions, and they were free, but waiting for the next one was slower than just figuring it out — so I spent most of my time googling how to do things in software I was paying for. Eventually I added another application on top of it to cover what was missing. The schedule did sync to our iPhone calendars — but every appointment came across without the project address. I had to paste it in by hand, one at a time, every time we made a change.

For six months I bandaided software together. When we finally left, I asked Houzz Pro for our line items — three hundred of them, built up over five years and carried by hand into every system we'd used — and they told me it wasn't possible to export. I re-entered all of it manually.

Somewhere in those six months, other contractors started telling us they had exactly the same problems. What they needed, they said, was someone like me to bandaid their business.

That's when I stopped looking for the right tool and started building one.

Laura giving thumbs up during a kitchen remodel

The operational trenches. About Alpha Remodelers.

Alpha Remodelers opened in Chandler, Arizona in 2021 — a veteran-owned kitchen and bath company. Travis served in the Army before Alpha and runs the jobs now — on every site every day, inspecting every inch of every project. He's a boots-on-the-ground guy, not a techy guy — which is why the software I eventually built had to be something he could pick up and use without training.

I run the backend: operations, bookkeeping, estimates, scheduling, trade coordination, QuickBooks. I can also design and measure a kitchen and step onto the job myself when that's what it takes.

Alpha runs residential remodeling in the Phoenix East Valley — Chandler, Gilbert, Mesa, Tempe, Scottsdale. The bread and butter is kitchens and bathrooms, but we also take on whole-home refreshes, additions, and the occasional full gut-to-studs renovation when the project fits. Projects typically run $25k–$150k with timelines of 4–12 weeks, with 4–10 trade partners on any given job — demolition, plumbing, electrical, drywall, cabinetry, countertops, tile, flooring, finish carpentry, paint.

The joke, the plan, and the reality.

For a while it was a joke. Travis would tell contractors we ran into that his wife did the ops. They'd nod and say some version of "I need my own Laura." At first it was a joke. Then it was a plan.

I'd spent years implementing software and running operations for multi-million-dollar businesses across a range of industries — including a home builder. That gave me a specific eye for what was missing in every contractor tool we tried. I started prototyping what would become MY LAURA at the end of 2025, using Alpha's real operations as the test bed. Every feature had to pass one test: would this save Laura or Travis time, and will Travis be able to use it without training?

By February 2026, MY LAURA was running Alpha's day-to-day on every job. In August 2026, we opened it up to other contractors.

Alpha is still the primary customer.

Alpha isn't a prototype account or a pilot customer. Alpha is the working company where MY LAURA was invented, and it's still the primary customer. Every feature in MY LAURA was built because I needed it at Alpha. Every bug in MY LAURA gets found by Alpha before it reaches you. Every roadmap decision goes through the question "would this save Laura time at Alpha?"

When other software companies talk about "customer-informed product development," they mean user interviews and survey results. When we talk about it, we mean Alpha is running a real kitchen gut-job in Chandler right now, using the software — and if something breaks, Travis texts me and it gets fixed the same day.

What we ship now

$299/month. No tiers. No upsells. No sales calls. Everything included on day one. Alpha Remodelers is still a customer. Travis is still the QA team — when a feature breaks his workflow, we know within hours because he texts me and it gets fixed by end of day.

Your data is yours. No traps.

When we left our last platform, our item catalogue — five years of descriptions, costs, and margins — I was told couldn't be exported. I retyped all three hundred entries by hand.

I always knew where the signed estimates lived. I'd been downloading them one at a time on every software switch — that part I was used to. What I hadn't thought to check was whether the item data could come with us. Every other tool I'd used could do it. Nobody thinks about the exit until they're at it, and by then it's a bad week.

MY LAURA doesn't ask you to think about it. Connect Google Drive and your signed estimates end up in your own Drive. Documents and photos you add to a project go there too. Your item library exports. Whatever happens later, what you put in is already yours and already somewhere you control.

Frequently asked questions.

Is Alpha Remodelers still actively remodeling homes using this platform?

Yes. We run our entire live construction company on MY LAURA every single day. Every calculation error, scheduling update, and change order flow is battle-tested in real-world Phoenix East Valley residential projects before it ever updates on your screen.

Can I truly export my entire database if I ever decide to leave?

Yes, 100%. Having to manually type 300 item codes by hand because a software platform locked my data away was infuriating. Your data is your property. You can cleanly export your complete item catalogs, vendor details, and job files whenever you choose.

Who answers the support link if a feature isn't working on a job site?

A real person — usually me. Because this platform is built and owned entirely by a trade operator rather than a massive corporate investment company, you get direct access to the person who designed the workflows.

A note for homeowners. If you're a homeowner in the Phoenix area looking for a kitchen or bath remodeler, Alpha keeps its own site separate from this one on purpose — Alpha is a real contracting business serving real Phoenix-area homes, not a marketing prop for the software. You can find Alpha through the usual channels.

Built because I paid for a year of software that was supposed to solve this — and didn't.