The COI Tracker: Boring SaaS for Contractors Where One Lapsed Certificate Costs Six Figures

Here’s a business problem most software founders will never hear about, because it lives on job sites instead of in Slack channels. A general contractor (GC) hires a roofing sub. The sub’s certificate of insurance (COI) was valid when the job started. Four months in, the sub’s policy lapses — nonpayment, carrier drop, whatever. Nobody notices because the COI is a PDF in somebody’s email from March. Then a worker falls.

If the sub’s coverage is dead, the claim climbs the ladder to the GC’s policy, the GC’s carrier fights it because their contract required subs to carry valid insurance, and the GC is suddenly personally exposed on a claim that can run well into six figures. This isn’t a rare horror story. It’s the standard failure mode, and the industry’s main defense against it is a spreadsheet with an “expiry date” column that nobody reopens.

Two problems that turned out to be one product

In the opportunity research we track, this showed up as two separate variants that converged on inspection. One was COI and license-expiry tracking — keep every sub’s insurance certificates and trade licenses on file, know when they expire, chase renewals automatically. The other was payment-side compliance: collecting lien waivers from subs when you pay them, so a sub can’t cash your check and then file a mechanic’s lien against the property anyway.

These are the same workflow at different moments. Before a sub sets foot on site: verify docs. Every month they’re working: keep docs current. Every time money moves: collect a waiver. It’s one compliance spine running through the whole GC-sub relationship, which is why one simple product can cover both and why the two research variants kept blurring together.

Why the incumbents leave this open

Procore does compliance tracking. So do a few enterprise insurtech platforms that big GCs use. But Procore starts at several hundred dollars a month and is built for companies running dozens of projects with dedicated back-office staff. The GC with 8 to 30 subs and a two-person office isn’t buying Procore to solve one problem — they’re using Excel, a shared drive, and the office manager’s memory.

That’s the classic gap: too small for enterprise software, problem too painful to actually ignore. There are a few hundred thousand small GCs and specialty contractors in the US alone who manage subs, and the data we track keeps flagging the same phrases in their forums — “COI tracking spreadsheet,” “lien waiver template,” “how do you track sub insurance.” When people are searching for spreadsheet templates, they’re telling you the job exists and the tooling doesn’t.

What the product actually is

The temptation is to build a platform. Resist it. The version that sells is almost embarrassingly simple.

• A sub directory: each sub with their COIs, license numbers, W-9, and whatever else the GC’s contract requires, uploaded once.
• Expiry alerts: email or text to the GC and the sub at 30, 14, and 3 days out, plus a dashboard that shows red/yellow/green across every sub at a glance.
• A renewal chase flow: the sub (or their insurance agent) gets a link to upload the new certificate directly, so the GC’s office manager stops playing email tag.
• Waivers at payment time: when the GC records a payment, the system sends the sub the right lien waiver — conditional or unconditional, progress or final — collects the signature, and files it against the project.

That’s it. No scheduling, no estimating, no project management. A competent developer can ship this in two or three months. The hard parts aren’t technical — they’re knowing that waiver forms are state-specific (California’s are statutory and exact), that COIs have multiple coverage lines that each expire separately, and that the GC’s real customer for this data is sometimes their own insurance auditor at year end. That domain knowledge is the moat, thin as it sounds.

The pricing logic: priced against a lawsuit, not a spreadsheet

Business-to-business (B2B) willingness to pay tracks the size of the problem you’re removing, and this problem is enormous relative to the price of software. A GC who’s been burned once — or watched a competitor get burned — doesn’t compare your $79-a-month tool to a free spreadsheet. They compare it to their deductible, their premium increase after a claim, and the legal bill from a lien fight. Against that, $950 a year rounds to zero.

Something like $49 a month for up to 15 subs and $99 to $149 for more feels right, and we’d guess you could charge more once you have testimonials. Fifty customers at $79 average is about $47,000 a year of recurring revenue from a product one person can maintain. Two hundred customers is a real business. Construction software also churns less than consumer software as a service (SaaS) — switching costs are low but attention is lower, and a tool that quietly prevents disasters doesn’t get audited out of the budget the way marketing tools do.

Distribution is the actual hard part

We’ll be honest: building this is the easy half. Contractors don’t hang out on Product Hunt. They don’t respond to cold email well, and they buy on referral more than any market we track. Your realistic channels are commercial insurance agents (who deal with COI chaos daily and would happily recommend the tool that stops their clients calling them), construction bookkeepers and certified public accountants (CPAs), trade association newsletters, and content that ranks for the exact spreadsheet-template searches mentioned above. Give away the best free COI tracking spreadsheet on the internet, and put the upgrade path right in it.

Expect sales cycles measured in weeks, not clicks, and expect to do onboarding calls for your first fifty customers. That’s not a flaw — it’s why the niche stays uncrowded.

Who this isn’t for

Skip this if you have zero connection to construction and no willingness to acquire one. You’ll need to read actual subcontracts, understand what a “additional insured endorsement” is, and get state waiver forms right — errors here damage real businesses, and word travels fast in trade circles. It’s also wrong for anyone who wants a viral, product-led growth story. This is knock-on-doors SaaS with a slow, sturdy curve.

And be careful about scope: you’re building a tracking and workflow tool, not giving insurance or legal advice. The product reminds and collects; the GC and their agent decide what coverage is adequate. Keep that line bright in your copy and your terms.

If you can find five small GCs willing to talk this month — and if you ask around, you can — you’ll know within five conversations whether this is real. Our bet, based on how consistently it surfaces in the research, is that at least three of them will pull up the spreadsheet and ask when they can start. The build philosophy — single purpose, offline-friendly, none of your data — is the same one behind the receipt and warranty vault.