Questions
The things people actually ask
Including the ones with awkward answers. If your question is not here, ask it.
What it is
What is Oleera, in one sentence?
One system that covers both getting the customer and doing the work, so the ad that produced a job is still attached to the money when the invoice is paid.
Who is it for?
Local service businesses, mostly in the trades: plumbing, HVAC, electrical, water treatment, restoration. Roughly two people to fifty. Below two, most of this is more system than you need. Above fifty, you probably want something with a dedicated dispatcher's product.
Is this a CRM?
A CRM is part of it. Calling the whole thing a CRM would undersell it and, more usefully, would price it wrong: a CRM that also schedules crews, bills customers, takes payments and runs your email is an operating system for the business, and the useful comparison is against what you pay for two systems today rather than against a contact database.
Do I have to use all of it at once?
No, and most businesses do not. The usual order is customers and invoicing first, then booking and email, then operations once the first two are habit. Onboarding is done with you rather than left to a help centre, so the order can be whatever suits your week.
Against what you have now
How is this different from GoHighLevel?
GoHighLevel is genuinely good at getting a lead to a booked call. It stops there. It has no field operations at all, which is why almost everybody running it also pays for a second system, and its reporting keys off the date a record was created rather than the date a deal closed, so revenue lands in the wrong month.
There is also a trap worth knowing about: the usual fix for its email deliverability is bringing your own SMTP, which breaks its campaign reporting. You can have deliverability or you can have reporting. In Oleera your own verified domain is the normal path and the reporting is built on top of it.
How is this different from ServiceTitan or Jobber?
They start at the booked job and they are good from there. What they cannot do is acquire a customer: they can market to a database they already have, but the ad, the form and the first conversation happened somewhere else, so the lead source was never recorded and the return on that spend is not a number they can produce.
They are also priced and shaped for a larger operation. Oleera is built for the business where the owner is still on the tools two days a week.
Can I keep using the software I already have?
For payments, yes and by design: you connect your own Stripe account and stay the merchant of record. For email, yes: you send from your own verified domain. For a second CRM or field system, you can, but you will be back to bridging two systems by hand, which is the problem Oleera exists to remove.
Your data
Can you move my data across?
Yes, and we have done it with real books rather than demo data, including a full GoHighLevel account reconciled to the cent. Contacts, properties, deals and products import from CSV with a preview of exactly what will happen before anything is written, and duplicates are matched on email and phone rather than blindly appended.
Who owns the data?
You do. You can export contacts, invoices, proposals, deals, products, tasks and jobs to CSV at any time, from inside the app, without asking us and without a support ticket.
Can other businesses on Oleera see my customers?
No. Every account's data is isolated at the database level rather than by application code remembering to filter, which is the difference between a boundary and a habit. Every query is scoped to your account and every action taken by our staff on your account is recorded in an audit log you can be shown.
What happens if I stop paying, or leave?
A failed payment gives you 14 days to fix it with no loss of access. After that the account is suspended. Cancelling takes effect at the end of the cycle you have paid for. Either way the account is then archived for 90 days and can be brought back exactly as it was, and after 90 days it is permanently deleted.
The AI
Will it email my customers without asking me?
No, and not as a setting. Sending email, creating or changing a proposal or invoice, and changing a job or a visit are refused unattended in the code itself rather than in a preferences table. A limit a settings row can raise is not a limit. Changing any of them would take a new release of the software.
What if it gets something wrong?
You see the proposed change before it happens, in plain English, with the records it read. Rejecting it costs you a click. The honest thing to say about this whole category is that undo does not exist anywhere in it, ours included, so the real answer is prevention and visibility rather than a promise to clean up afterwards.
How much does the AI cost?
250 actions a month are included on both plans, and most businesses do not reach that. Past it, $100 for another 250. An action is a conversation or one run of a standing instruction; reading a screen is not one.
Is my business data used to train AI models?
No. Your records are sent to the model only to answer your own questions, in your own account, and are not used to train anything.
Getting started
Why can I not just sign up?
Because we are onboarding a small number of businesses at a time and doing the setup properly with each one: moving the data, verifying your sending domain, connecting your payments, building the first automations around how you actually work. That is not something a signup form does well, and pretending otherwise would produce a lot of half-configured accounts.
How long does setup take?
Days rather than months. The parts with real waiting in them are outside our control: verifying an email domain is DNS, and registering a number for business texting takes as long as the carriers take.
What does it cost?
$199 a month for everything except field operations, $349 with them. 3 users included in both, then $25 per user and $10 per field technician. Full pricing.
Who is behind it?
McKinney Creative Ventures, a marketing technology firm in Woodbury, Minnesota. Oleera was built to run MCV's own clients and MCV is the first business on it. More about that.
See whether it fits your business
Oleera is onboarding a small number of businesses at a time, so setup is done properly rather than left to a help article. Tell us what you run and we will tell you honestly whether it is a fit.