Why I Built Paint Pals

I'm Shane. I've been a painting contractor since 2006 — I still own and run a painting company today. Paint Pals is the estimating software I built for my own crews first, and it exists because of one obsession: bidding paint jobs accurately.

Where my numbers come from

Most estimating advice is somebody's opinion. I wanted data. Years ago I had my assistant spend a month on our job sites doing nothing but watching painters work and timing every task — walls, trim, doors, prep, cut-ins. That became the first version of my production standards, and I've been tracking real jobs against them and adjusting ever since. They've now been pressure-tested with thousands of painters. Painting Business Pro — one of the biggest coaching programs in the painting industry — licenses my estimating standards and spreadsheets for their students, and I serve as the estimating expert in their community.

Those standards are what's inside Paint Pals. Not industry averages copied from a book — a working company's numbers, tuned for years, that you then adjust to your own crew.

Why the software is different

Every estimating tool on the market prices a job the same way: a rate for walls, a rate for baseboards, and if you do both, it adds them. Purely additive. But that's not how painting works.

Think about baseboards. If you're painting only the baseboards, you have to create that clean, crisp line where they meet the wall — careful cutting, taping the wall, taping the floor. That line is real time. But if you're painting the baseboards and the walls, you paint the baseboards first and the wall coat covers your line — the line work disappears. Two surfaces together are genuinely faster than the sum of each alone. Additive software gets that job wrong every single time; it can only bid x + y.

Paint Pals prices the combination — it knows which prep steps disappear when surfaces are painted together, and the bid reflects it. Same thinking on coats: instead of one lump rate for "two coats," Paint Pals knows the first coat takes this long and each additional coat takes that long — so one coat, two coats, three, or a primer coat all price exactly, not approximately. These sound like small things. They're the difference between a bid that's right and a bid that's close — and over a year of jobs, "close" is expensive.

To my knowledge, no other estimating software does this. It's the kind of thing you only build if you've actually painted.

Why I'm all-in on this

I'll be straight with you about the path here. Over the years I built a painting company, a roofing company, a Christmas light business, three YouTube channels, an Amazon influencer operation, and a CRM I configured and sold to other painters. They worked. But about two years ago I realized the better strategy was to pour everything into one thing instead of running six. I put partners and leadership teams in charge of the other businesses — my painting company runs day-to-day under its own heads of sales, production, and marketing — and I chose this.

Paint Pals is my focus now. And my painting company doubles as its living laboratory — every feature gets used on real estimates, real kitchen tables, real jobs, before you ever see it.

You decide what gets built next

This is the beginning, and I'd rather build what painters actually need than what I assume they want. So there's a feature request board built into the software, with voting — whatever the most painters ask for is what I build next. Early users aren't just customers; they're steering the product.

That's also why the price is $10/month right now. I want the software in real painters' hands, finding the rough edges, stacking up wins and testimonials — and the founding price is my end of that deal. It won't stay this low, but everyone who helps build this thing gets in at the ground floor.

I'm confident Paint Pals is already the most accurate estimating software a painting contractor can buy. Give it a month — if it doesn't earn its keep, I'll refund your ten bucks.

Want to see how I estimate? Start with the 7.5-step method I use on every estimate and how production rates work.

— Shane, painting contractor since 2006, founder of Paint Pals