/ About
Australian-founded.
By tradies, for the trade.
We started Karven because every existing quoting tool treats a decking job like a SaaS subscription. Same generic line items, same blank-canvas builder, same Friday-night Excel dance. We're building the version that already knows the maths.
§01 / The story
Why we exist.
Karven started with a garage door quote. A mate in Sydney was trying to price a 4500 × 2400 sectional door with Castellated horizontal cladding, three frame brackets per side, jamb cost varying by length, plus top-hats and trims. He had a Tradify subscription. Tradify is a great job-management tool, but on the quote screen, it's a blank canvas. He was doing the maths in his head with a calculator app open, copy-pasting line items, and 25 minutes in he'd still managed to miss the cart-away policy.
The job got quoted. The quote got accepted. The maths was wrong by $340.
Karven is what we wished we'd had that night. A per-trade calculator that already knows how garage doors are actually built, how decking boards are actually cut, what concreting actually costs per m² in your suburb. Adding a new trade is a quick config change, not a big rebuild. AU supplier prices wired in nightly so when Bunnings Trade moves on decking boards, your quotes move with them.
Around that calculator we're building all the compliance gear: SWMS, subbie onboarding with ABN Lookup, RCTI, TPAR, Xero + MYOB push, a licence + insurance vault with NSW + QLD + VIC verification, the surcharge-ban toggle ahead of the 1 October 2026 deadline. The boring stuff that's expensive to get wrong and invisible when it's right.
§02 / What we believe
Three working principles.
01
Per workspace, not per user
Your apprentice should not cost $39 a month to add. Karven is workspace-billed. Add the whole crew for the price of one.
02
Built for Australia
Quiet hours, public-holiday awareness, GST, ABN, BAS, TPAR, RCTI, state-licensee registers. We don't bolt AU on after. It's the starting point.
03
Honest about scope
We don't do scheduling or timesheets. We point you at Tradify or ServiceM8 for that. The right tool for the right job.
§03 / The team
Small on purpose.
Karven is founder-built. One person on the keyboard, dozens of active tradies in the loop. Every template is reviewed against quotes that actually got accepted. We're deliberately small so we can move on what tradies actually ask for, not what looks good in a press release.