Why SubTrade began

Built between
site visits

SubTrade was not started by a tech company that discovered construction. It was started by a subcontractor who got tired of software that had never met one.

Fabian runs Quality Gypsum Services, a commercial drywall and steel stud subcontractor in Calgary. Estimating, supervising, chasing draws, managing crews across multiple sites. The same week-to-week reality as every sub reading this page.

The field management tools on the market were all built for general contractors. Priced for GC budgets, designed around GC workflows, with subcontractors treated as an afterthought seat license. The things that actually protect a sub's margin, like getting change orders signed before the work happens or building a progress draw with correct holdback, were either missing or buried.

So SubTrade got built, feature by feature, against real jobs. Fabian brought the problem and the jobsites; his co-founder Steban Vargas, a senior software developer, saw the idea and made it real, turning field frustrations into working software. Every tool shipped because a working subcontracting business needed it on an actual project first, and when something was clumsy in the field, it got fixed, because the founders' own crews were the first ones stuck using it.

That is still how it works today. Fabian still estimates and runs drywall projects every week. SubTrade is developed in the gap between site visits, which is exactly why it fits in yours.

The founders

Fabian VargasCo-Founder · The Field

President of Quality Gypsum Services, a Calgary commercial drywall and steel stud subcontractor. Still estimating and running projects every week. Every SubTrade workflow starts with a problem from his jobsites.

Steban VargasCo-Founder · Senior Software Developer

The engineer who saw the idea and made it come true. Steban turned jobsite frustrations into the platform itself, building SubTrade from the first line of code into software crews actually use.

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