https://squatch-soft.com/blog/ Recent content in Field Notes on Squatch Soft Hugo en-us Sun, 11 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://squatch-soft.com/blog/the-squatch-is-real/ Sun, 11 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://squatch-soft.com/blog/the-squatch-is-real/ <p>Every Pacific Northwest town has a guy who swears he&rsquo;s seen Bigfoot. Our version of that story starts: <em>a master tech swears he can build better shop software than the stuff he&rsquo;s paying for every month.</em> The difference is, we have screenshots.</p> <p>Squatch Soft grew out of a working European auto shop in Idaho&rsquo;s Treasure Valley — three locations, a lot of BMWs, and a front counter that lives or dies by its software. For years that software was rented: per-seat pricing, modules behind paywalls, and our own guest history sitting on somebody else&rsquo;s server, in somebody else&rsquo;s format, retrievable at somebody else&rsquo;s pleasure.</p> https://squatch-soft.com/blog/self-hosted-isnt-scary/ Mon, 05 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://squatch-soft.com/blog/self-hosted-isnt-scary/ <p>&ldquo;Self-hosted&rdquo; used to be a warning label. It meant a dusty server, a guy named Dale who&rsquo;d set it up in 2009, and a backup tape nobody had tested since the Obama administration.</p> <p>That&rsquo;s not what it means now — and it&rsquo;s the entire bet behind ShopDesk.</p> <p><strong>What self-hosted means in practice:</strong> a small, quiet computer in your shop runs the program. Your team opens it in a browser, same as any cloud app. The difference is whose computer it is. Yours.</p>