Built by a Tech, for Techs

The parking lot problem

You know the drill. It's 2 AM, you're standing in a plant parking lot, phone in one hand, flashlight in the other, Googling a fault code you've never seen before. The manual is 400 pages of useless. The forums are full of guys guessing. And the one person who actually knew this machine inside and out? He retired last year.

I lived that for over twenty years. PLC programming, controls engineering, industrial maintenance. Allen-Bradley, Siemens, VFDs, conveyor systems, packaging lines, palletizers. If it moves product in a plant, I've probably had my hands on it at 3 AM wondering why it stopped.

The knowledge drain

Here's what nobody talks about at the trade shows: the best diagnostic knowledge in any facility lives in the heads of maybe three guys. And those guys are retiring.

I watched it happen over and over. A senior tech with 30 years on a specific machine retires, and suddenly the whole plant is fumbling through problems he could have diagnosed by sound alone. His field tricks, his shortcuts, the patterns he recognized -- all gone. Written down nowhere.

Maintenance managers know this pain. You can't hire fast enough, you can't train fast enough, and you definitely can't afford to lose what your experienced techs know.

So I built the thing I needed

Not from a co-working space in San Francisco. From a truck. Tested on real plant floors, with real fault codes, on real equipment that was supposed to be running product five minutes ago.

FaultExpert started as a personal tool -- a way to capture the diagnostic knowledge I'd built up over two decades and make it searchable. Then I started adding the stuff the retired guys taught me. Then the field tricks that aren't in any manual. Then the ranked probable causes that save you from checking the obvious last.

Why $19 and not $200

ServiceTitan charges $200+ per tech per month. UpKeep wants $45. MaintainX is $16 but gives you a work order system, not a diagnostic brain.

$19/mo because this tool should help every tech, not just the ones working for companies with fat software budgets. A one-man shop should have the same diagnostic firepower as a plant with 50 maintenance techs. That's not a business strategy. That's just how it should be.

What this isn't

This isn't a CMMS. It's not a work order system. It's not trying to replace your maintenance software. It's the thing you pull up when the line is down and you need an answer in 60 seconds, not 60 minutes.

Snap a photo of a faulted drive. Get the probable causes ranked by likelihood. See the field tricks that actually work. Find the replacement part with a price. That's it. No dashboards, no KPIs, no quarterly business reviews. Just answers when the line is down.

Who this is for

Field techs who are tired of Googling fault codes on their phone. Maintenance managers watching institutional knowledge walk out the door with every retirement. Plant ops teams that need faster mean time to repair without hiring three more senior techs they can't find anyway.

If you've ever said "the old guy would have known this one" -- that's why this exists.