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MOD-06

Upkeep

ConceptMaintenance

A modern way to get your home cleaned: on demand or on a schedule, at a price agreed before anyone arrives, by someone paid properly and never filmed. Every visit closes into a record the property keeps.

A developed concept: nothing is built and nothing is bookable. Moduloa’s active build is Manufacturing.

The premise

Industry solved recurring maintenance decades ago: asset registers, preventive schedules, work orders, and a record of everything done. Homes and small properties got none of that discipline. A house is a machine without a logbook: the service intervals live in one person’s head, the history leaves with the previous owner, and failures arrive as surprises that were never actually surprising.

Booking the work is no better. You describe your home to a stranger, guess how many hours it takes, and start again from nothing the next time. Upkeep is the attempt to fix both ends at once: make the booking simple, and make the property remember.

What it is

Ask for a clean, or set one running. Same app, same price, same person.

Closer to calling a car than to hiring a contractor. You should never have to estimate how long your own home takes.

On demandAsk, and get matchedRequest a clean and get matched to whoever has capacity near you, with the price and the arrival window shown before you confirm. Same day when someone is free, and you always see what it costs before you say yes.
ScheduledSet it and stop thinkingA recurring slot that just happens: weekly, fortnightly, monthly. The same person wherever possible, because someone who already knows your home does a better job of it in less time.
One priceAn outcome, not an hour countYou buy a defined result for a fixed price, agreed before anyone arrives. No negotiating scope on the doorstep and no bill that depends on how fast someone worked.
It is recordedThe home keeps the receiptEvery visit closes into the property’s own record: what was done, when, by whom, at what cost. Over time that record is worth more than any single clean.
The membership

Pay per clean, or become a member

Book one clean whenever you want one. Or subscribe, and get a better price on every visit, first call when the city is busy, and your own cleaner kept.

A better price, every visitMembers pay less for the same clean. That reduction comes out of shorter visits and tighter routes. See below for what it never comes out of.
First in line when it is busyFriday afternoon, the week before Christmas, the day before guests arrive. Members get first call on same-day capacity.
Your cleaner, keptThe same person each time, as a guarantee rather than a hope, and free rescheduling when the week changes shape.
Put right, no argumentIf something is not right, it gets redone at no charge, against a standard written down in advance instead of argued about afterwards.
The record, and one on the houseYour property’s full service history, kept and portable if you sell, and one clean a year included in the membership.

No prices are published here because none are set. The reasoning behind the membership (what it can fund, what it cannot, and why one included clean rather than four) is in the research.

The position

What Upkeep will not do to make the numbers work

Most of what is wrong with this industry is not a technology problem. These five commitments decide what gets built, and each of them costs something.

01 · Nobody is underpaid to make the price work

Every operator is a legally approved cleaning business on the public register, insured, carrying a valid HMS card, paid at or above the statutory floor. Home cleaning gets cheap in this country by paying people badly or working off the books, and both are available to anyone who wants them. A lower price has to come from shorter visits and tighter routes, and if it cannot come from there, it does not come.

02 · Nobody is watched

No camera runs in your home, and none runs on the person cleaning it either. A house holds children, medication, documents and everything else nobody agreed to put on film. Proof that the work happened is arrival and departure, a room-by-room checklist and your own confirmation: the least intrusive thing that still works. A service whose answer to trust is a camera has not solved trust.

03 · The record belongs to the property, not to us

Export it whenever you want, in full. It goes with the house when you sell it, to whoever buys it. A service history you cannot take with you is not a feature, it is a hostage, and this is the one part of Upkeep that gets more valuable the longer it exists, so it is the part most worth refusing to hold over anyone.

04 · The price is settled before anyone rings the doorbell

No renegotiating scope in your hallway, no watching the clock, no invoice that arrives larger than the number you agreed to. You are buying a result, so a fast worker is not a discount and a slow one is not a surcharge. If we misjudged the job, that is our error to absorb and our model to fix.

05 · Nothing is built to trap you

Cancel as easily as you signed up, and keep the record on the way out. A membership should have to be worth paying for every single month, and one that survives on the friction of leaving is not a membership; it is a subscription trap with better wording.

Why the cleaning and the logbook are one product

A fortnightly clean is the only recurring physical visit most homes ever get. Somebody is already standing in the property, already seeing the state of it. If every visit closes into the property’s own record, the register stops being a form somebody has to sit down and fill in: it accumulates as a by-product of work that was happening anyway.

And it runs the other way. A service that already knows the house does the job better, and does it faster, than one meeting it for the first time. Cleaning is the way in. The record is the reason. Neither half is worth nearly as much on its own, which is the whole bet.

The structure

Three ledgers, one property

01 · The registerWhat the property is made of: roof, gutters, heat source, water heater, ventilation, the machines inside (each with its age and expected life). You cannot maintain what you have not named.
02 · The cadenceWhat recurs and when: filter changes, gutter clearing, the winterizing sequence before the first frost. In Norway the cadence is season-driven, not calendar-driven: the year has edges, and the work hangs on them.
03 · The logWhat was done, when, by whom, at what cost. The same unit-record idea Manufacturing keeps per part and Trace keeps per animal, pointed at the most common asset people own.
Why it belongs in Moduloa

Recurring work benefits from systems more than any other kind of work. That is the whole brand. The pattern is already proven twice on this site: a record per part in Manufacturing, a curve per animal in Trace. Upkeep is the same move, made where everyone lives.

Honest status

Nothing is built. Nothing is bookable. No operator has been contracted and no price has been set. Concept stage means exactly that here.

The market has been researched properly and the economics have been modelled to the point where they can be checked, and as modelled, they do not yet close. The first bench test is still one real property: write its full register, one season of cadences, start the log, and let that decide what the software has to be.

Go deeper

The research behind it

Read this if you want to judge whether the idea survives contact with Norway rather than take our word for it.

Who already does this and what their filed accounts say. The 25% VAT problem that turns a healthy-looking margin into a loss of ten kroner a job. Why Sweden has a large legal household-cleaning market and Norway does not. The statutory wage floor, the Cleaning Register, and the point at which an independent operator becomes an employee in law. Why there will be no cameras. And the one variable that decides whether any of this works, which nobody has measured.

Read the research →

Documentation, decisions, and build logs accumulate here. Everything is public.
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