GreenPal, an on-demand lawn mowing service provider that allows customers to accept bids for lawn care service from professionals through an app on their phone, launched coverage in Cranston last week.

“GreenPal has kind of been described as the Uber of lawn care,” said Co-Founder Gene Caballero. “It’s the easiest way for homeowners to find, schedule and pay their lawn guy.”

Caballero explained that by simply downloading the free app, homeowners can enter the property they want serviced and what day they want it done before local vendors get the opportunity to place bids for the work.

“Vendors bid on the property based on the Google street view and square footage of the property,” Caballero said. “Bids then go over to the homeowner for approval. Homeowners get a chance to see each vendor's ratings, reviews and price and then they decide who they want to work with based on that criteria.”

While the idea is to help vendors and homeowners connect for regular lawn care it also gives clients the ability to schedule service from a company and then witness their work in order to decide if they want to continue working with a specific vendor or want to try another.

“Homeowners don’t pay until after the service is complete and they’re happy with it,” explained Caballero. “It’s like booking a hotel. You see somebody you like, the rate that you like and you put in your credit card and it reserves that date. Once the vendor is done with the property they take a picture of it and send it to the owner as a digital invoice. That goes to the homeowner and they can then push to pay.”

With bids, what you see is what you get, Caballero said of the company’s transparent pricing.

“GreenPal has zero influence on the bidding,” he said. “That is all done by the local vendors. So, if a homeowner is quoted $50 then that is what the homeowner pays.”

Homeowners are charged no service fees or surcharges. Five percent of each transaction goes to GreenPal, and another 2.9% goes to the payment transaction company they use, Stripe, leaving 92.1% of the agreed bid goes to the vendor, but the homeowner sees none of that on their end, Caballero said.

The idea for GreenPal came about in 2012, Caballero recalled, but he said it didn’t really make it out of development until 2015.

“It took three years of failure, development, failure and more development, but now we’re in over 250 major markets with revenues of $30 million per year. Now here we are in Cranston.”

GreenPal, Caballero said, started in Nashville, Tennessee. Working in the landscaping industry since middle school, toting a push mower around to the neighbors’ houses, he mowed lawns all the way through college until his first job out of college, which was in sales.

The idea that people were using services that had strangers picking them up to take them to the grocery store or to live in their spare room for a week, then at some point they were going to want to do that with home services.

“We launched in Providence at the end of the summer last year,” Caballero said. “What people don’t realize is a landscaper isn’t going to drive much more than five miles to mow a lawn, because there’s not a lot of margin built in. So, we kind of saw organic homeowners and vendors signing up in the Cranston area. When we have both of those organically signing up we know it’s going to be a market that we need to launch sooner than later.”

Based on that data, over 50 vendors signing up and over two hundred homeowners, Cranston homeowners were clearly looking for more consistent lawn service.

“We let our data tell us where to go next, and it’s done us well for the last 8 years,” Caballero said.

Residents can also access the Cranston's GreenPal services here