ORBT Labs
Operational software · National City

Simple ops software in National City.

The software your shop runs on every day — the deal log, the dispatch board, the invoice queue — built around how you already work. Single-tenant. Yours to keep. No monthly platform fee skimming your margin.

Start a brief Or email hello@orbtlabs.com
01 — Why this, here

National City runs on margins, not software budgets.

This is a working town. Auto dealerships line the Mile of Cars. Logistics yards and freight forwarders sit close to the port and the border. Trades crews, family retail, and cross-border importers fill out the rest. The common thread is thin margins and long hours — nobody here is paying $400 a month for a SaaS seat they use for one screen.

So the operations live somewhere cheaper and worse. A deal log in a shared spreadsheet. A dispatch board that is literally a whiteboard. An invoice pile that gets keyed into QuickBooks at the end of the month by whoever has the time. It works until volume climbs, and then the cracks show up as a unit that got double-sold or a load that nobody scheduled.

The right move is not enterprise software. It is one small app that does the few things this business cannot afford to get wrong — owned outright, with no rent attached.

02 — What we build

The few screens the business actually lives in.

  • Single-tenant Next.js + Postgres build — no SaaS subscription forever.
  • The three to five workflows that move money, nothing extra to maintain.
  • Stripe for payments, Resend for email, Clerk for auth — boring infrastructure that holds.
  • Full source handoff. You own the repo. No vendor can switch you off.
  • Handoff documentation a shop manager can read without a developer.
  • Hosted on Vercel + Neon — accounts in your name, set up by us.

From $14,000 · 4 to 10 weeks · Owner-operated.

03 — What this looks like

Three shapes this takes in National City.

An independent used-car dealer on the Mile of Cars. Inventory lives across DealerCenter, a wall of paper deal jackets, and a text thread with the lot manager. We build an internal app that tracks each unit from acquisition to sold — recon status, asking price, days on lot, and a clean deal log so the owner can see gross per car without rebuilding a spreadsheet every Friday. One screen tells you what is aging and bleeding floor-plan interest.

A logistics and freight outfit near the port. They move cross-border loads and run a small fleet, dispatching by phone and a shared calendar that everyone overwrites. We build a dispatch board: loads in, driver and truck assignment with conflict detection, status from booked to delivered, and a billing module that drafts invoices from completed loads through Stripe. Dispatcher stops double-booking trucks, and the month-end invoicing scramble disappears.

A trades contractor working jobs out of Lincoln Acres. HVAC and plumbing crews, recurring maintenance accounts, and a backlog of unbilled work orders living in a binder. We build a job tracker with scheduling, a mobile-friendly work-order form the crew fills on site, and automatic invoice drafts the owner approves from his phone. The unbilled pile clears the same week the work gets done.

04 — Honest scope

This engagement fits if you run a real operation in National City, you can name the three to five workflows eating your week, and you would rather own your software than rent a seat forever. It is not the right call if you want a multi-tenant product to sell to other dealers or carriers — that is a far bigger build, and we will tell you so and point you elsewhere.

South Bay — in-person inside 30 minutes. We come to the lot, the yard, the shop. An hour watching how a deal or a load actually moves through your day beats a stack of requirements no one will read.

This page was drafted from a structured brief and hand-reviewed before launch. The work itself is custom, owner-operated, never templated.

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