14-05-2025
Uber-like lawn care platform launches in Austin. What to know about GreenPal.
Growing up, Gene Caballero would go door-to-door offering to mow lawns for his neighbors, hoping to make enough money to buy video games.
He continued working in the landscaping industry from middle school through college. His first job post-grad was in sales for Dell Technologies, covering the West Coast. He was there when Uber, Lyft, Airbnb and Vrbo began to take off.
"I just kind of had this inkling that, if somebody was going to allow a stranger to pick them up and take them somewhere, or allow a stranger to live in their extra bedroom for a weekend for money, then at some point I would hope that they would do the same with home services," Caballero told the American-Statesman.
Caballero and his friends — one of whom is Bryan Clayton, who previously founded landscape company Peach Tree Inc. — wanted to do just that: create an "Uber-like" way to connect consumers with landscapers and lawn care professionals.
In 2012, they founded Nashville-based GreenPal, and the online freelancing platform is now launching in Austin.
Users on the platform, which is free to join for both customers and landscapers, can order "contactless" lawn care by posting what service they need done and the preferred day for service. From there, nearby lawn care professionals freelancing on the app can "bid" on the lawn, and users choose the best option for them. The vendors take a time-stamped photo at the end of the service to show the completed work, and users use the platform to pay and set up additional appointments.
The prices are set by the lawn care professionals, not with fixed pricing like Uber, and GreenPal takes a 5% cut.
"There's no convenience fees or any charges or anything like that," Caballero said. "If the homeowner is quoted $35, that's what they pay."
The app is operating in 48 states and in 250 major markets, with more than 60,000 contractors on the platform. According to Caballero, more than 30% of the app's customers are over the age of 60, a "demographic that is particularly vulnerable to health risks and greatly benefits from the added safety and convenience provided by our platform."
GreenPal prescreens all the vendors, which must be 18 years old with a valid driver's license and Social Security number to offer services on the app.
Caballero said the most significant benefit of the platform is that it allows vendors to promote their businesses without spending extra time or money on marketing.
"If I could go talk to my 20-year-old self and say, 'Hey, what landscaping tool box would you want at your fingertips? And that's how we designed it," Caballero said. "They don't want to go knock on doors. A lot of them aren't aware of how to promote a business or anything like that, and so GreenPal kind of takes care of that. And there are scheduling softwares that they can pay for, there's route optimization software that they can pay for and there's also payment processing that they can pay for, but we do all that for them in house."
This article originally appeared on Austin American-Statesman: What to know about GreenPal, the Uber-like lawn care platform launching in Austin
