Yardbook
👤 Mark Ke & Brian Gamido (Ke (ex-enterprise architect) and co-founder Brian Gamido (ex-Deloitte ops) built a full trade suite and gave it away free.)🌐 siteLinkedIn
It gave 20,000 lawn crews a full business suite for $0, then earned on payments and a paying few.
Will it work? · our read
Zero-price moat. It won 20,000 crews by refusing to charge - a moat no funded rival wants to copy. But eight years on, that same free model keeps revenue near $1M. Reach, not riches.
01How the money moves
A lawn-care crew signs up free - scheduling, estimates, invoices
→
It runs daily ops on Yardbook; adds online payments and GPS
→
Yardbook earns: 1% payment fees, $35/mo paid tier, sponsored listings
02The numbers
20,000
landscaping businesses
Latka 24
$65M+
payments processed by 2016
TechCrunch
7
employees
Latka 24
Payment volume dwarfs revenue - the take-rate is the business. TechCrunch 2016
about $1M ARR (2024, Latka est.)
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(demo: preview the full teardown)Sourcesupdated · daily
Yardbook - product site: free landscaping business software, paid tiers, payments.Y Combinator (W16) - "free software for running landscaping businesses"; co-founded by Mark Ke and Brian Gamido.TechCrunch (2016) - 11,000 customers and $65M processed within about a year of launch.Latka - estimate: about $996K revenue, 20,000 customers, 7 employees (2024).Mark Ke (LinkedIn) - co-founder/CEO; prior enterprise field-app engineering background.
Revenue is a Latka ESTIMATE (about $996K, 2024), not founder-disclosed, so tagged Estimate and not independently confirmed. The first-party numbers are user and payment volumes: TechCrunch documented 11,000 crews and $65M processed within about a year of the 2016 launch; Latka lists about 20,000 crews and 7 staff for 2024. That estimate may even understate revenue, since $65M+ in annual payments at up to a 1% fee implies meaningful processing income - treat about $1M as a rough floor, not a precise figure. I preferred a disclosed-revenue case, but no boring-vertical candidate I checked (Skimmer, Gingr, FieldPulse, ServiceM8, Tradify) had a clean first-party number either. Ke's Oracle/Yahoo field-app background is per his LinkedIn, not independently confirmed [our read]. No fabricated drama: Yardbook won on a contrarian free-pricing bet and a lean team of two co-founders (Ke and Brian Gamido, ex-Deloitte); its honest weakness is that the same free model has kept revenue modest for years. We never score you.