What every ServiceTitan refugee told us — and how we built different

One of the highest-upvoted threads in r/HVAC asks "What's your biggest problem with ServiceTitan?" The answers are the most useful product roadmap a SaaS competitor could ask for. We read all of them. This post is what we built differently.

ServiceTitan isn't a bad product. It's a software company doing serious engineering work for a real customer base. But after 10+ years and hundreds of engineers, every SaaS accumulates debt — arbitrary limits, mobile-side bugs that have lasted years, vendor support that ignores tickets, settings access that's too coarse-grained.

When we started building Plyrium six days ago, we didn't have to invent a product roadmap. The contractor community already gave us one. We just had to read.

The seven complaints we heard most

"It erases a form I'm working on at least once a day"

The single most common complaint about ServiceTitan in the field is that mid-edit work disappears. Window blur, network blip, session timeout — the form wipes and the tech starts over. Sometimes saves an empty form by accident.

What we built: Every form in Plyrium auto-saves to local storage as you type. Close the tab, reload, lose your wifi, doesn't matter — your draft is right where you left it. We also won't let you save an empty form on accident; if a critical field is blank, the system stops you before you commit it. (Phase 1 ship; in active development as you read this.)

"It wipes my page in bad service areas"

Tech in a basement. Tech in a crawlspace. Tech in rural service areas where signal hits 1 bar. They all said the same thing: ServiceTitan stops working, and when it comes back, the work they did during the dropout is gone.

The community workaround is brutal: "Just put your phone in airplane mode before you start the job." That's not a workaround. That's a feature request the vendor never built.

What we built: Plyrium's tech app keeps working when the network drops. Status updates, time logs, parts logs — everything you do offline gets queued locally and syncs the moment you're back online. Your tech doesn't have to think about it. (PWA offline queue — Phase 1 ship.)

"It forces me to use a desktop on Sunday afternoon"

One of the most quoted complaints in the thread: "They forced an update that loads far too much information at once for the office side. You can't run it on anything mobile. Forget trying to answer and schedule calls on a Sunday during winter while out and about. I've asked repeatedly if there will ever be a mobile version of office and they said no way."

ServiceTitan was built when desktops were the primary device. Mobile is the afterthought.

What we built: Plyrium is mobile-first from day 1. There is no separate "office" app — every screen works on phone, tablet, and desktop. Schedule a customer from your phone in a deer stand. Reply to a lead from a coffee shop. We never wrote our software to assume you're at a desk.

"Settings access lets users edit company info, job types, forms..."

In ServiceTitan, "Settings" is one big bucket. Grant a dispatcher access to dispatch settings — congratulations, they can also edit your company name, your job types, and your billing forms. The feedback in the thread was unanimous: this is awful.

What we built: Permissions are per-feature, not per-page. Each member's permissions are stored as individual toggles — granting one (like editing billing) doesn't grant others (like editing company settings or managing the team). Your dispatcher can dispatch without accidentally renaming your business.

"Reactivate a tech 3 times then never again"

A bizarre one from the thread: "If a technician is offboarded for a user needs to update a custom field in a job, the deactivated technician is removed from the Lead tracking. The user cannot save changes to the custom fields because Lead Technician is now blank, so you either have to put in dummy data...you are only allowed to reactivate a managed technician 3 times before you cannot make any changes to them ever again."

A hard-coded magic number. A schema bug treated as feature. Cascading FK constraints with side effects nobody documented.

What we built: No arbitrary limits anywhere in the code. Every cap on your account is in your billing settings — seats per tier, locations per tier, leads per month. Predictable. Visible. Removable by upgrading, not by hitting a hidden mystery wall.

"Things disappear and reappear in production"

"I'm convinced that engineers of this product also modify their programming in production. We see things disappear and reappear all the time (forms, workflows, permissions, accounting data, batching, etc.)."

A 100-engineer team can ship features faster than they can coordinate with support. Beta rollouts happen silently. Customers find out something changed when their workflow breaks.

What we built: Every customer-facing change at Plyrium goes through our public changelog. Weekly digest of what shipped. No silent rollouts. No "this just appeared in your account" surprises. When something changes, you'll see it on the changelog before it changes — or right after, with full notes.

"Vendor support is a complete joke"

The complaint that hurt the most to read. "Their software developers are rolling users into their enterprise hub utility while it's still under testing/BETA. Breaking everything in its path."

When you're on a 5-truck shop budget paying enterprise prices, support that doesn't reply for days isn't just an annoyance — it's a margin killer.

What we built: Plyrium is built and operated by a solo founder. Every support email goes directly to the founder. There is no tier 1 / tier 2 / tier 3 escalation path because there are no tiers — there's just one person, replying within 24 hours, every time.

That doesn't scale forever. By the time it stops scaling, we'll have built a real support team that holds the same bar. Until then, you have a direct line.

Want the structured side-by-side?

We built a full head-to-head comparison page covering pricing, capabilities, and the seven r/HVAC complaints with our shipped defenses for each: Plyrium vs ServiceTitan. Includes a 24-row capability table and an honest "when you should stay on ServiceTitan" section.

What ServiceTitan customers can do

If you're reading this from inside ServiceTitan and any of those complaints sound familiar, here's what we built so you can try Plyrium without commitment:

• Live demo line. Call (928) 666-4329 right now. That's our public AI receptionist. Same engine that runs paying customers' phones.
• Public pricing. Every tier price is on /pricing. No demo required. $149/mo on the cheapest tier, $1,199/mo on the highest. No setup fee. No 12-month contract minimum. Month-to-month available.
• Migration path. If you want to move from ServiceTitan to Plyrium, email us directly. We'll talk through your data migration on the phone or via Zoom — no sales call, just figuring out if it's a fit.
• Built in Arizona. Plyrium is built in Coolidge, AZ — an hour from Phoenix. If you're an AZ contractor, we can grab coffee.

A note to anyone considering switching

Software switches are exhausting. Migrating customer data, retraining your team, learning new keyboard shortcuts — it costs real time and real money. We don't take that lightly.

The honest pitch is this: if ServiceTitan works for your shop and your team isn't complaining, don't switch. We're not interested in churning a working business onto a younger product just to hit a sales target.

But if you're seeing yourself in the complaints in this post — if your techs are telling you the same things those r/HVAC commenters said — Plyrium was designed to be different on every one of those points. Try the demo line. Try a single Voice tier subscription for a month. Compare for yourself.

Either way, the contractor community has been giving SaaS companies a free roadmap for a decade. We just decided to listen.

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Plyrium is built in Coolidge, Arizona, serving home-service contractors across the U.S. and Canada. AI receptionist, lead capture, recurring contracts, Google Business Profile autopilot. See pricing or call our demo line at (928) 666-4329.