ClaimYard — warranty-recovery desk for HVAC contractors

1. One-liner

Files every manufacturer labor claim before the deadline and flags the ones the OEM shortpaid.

2. Trend signal — why now?

HVAC contractors are sitting on unclaimed money and everyone in the trade knows it. The industry warranty claim rate is roughly 0.78% — meaning the overwhelming majority of eligible claims never get filed at all (HVAC Service Authority). It’s not that the parts don’t fail; it’s that filing is a chore with a short fuse. Manufacturer reimbursement claims must be received within 30–60 days from the date of service or they’re void (The Cooling Company, HVAC-Talk forum). Miss the window on a busy summer and that money is gone.

When contractors do file, they get burned twice: manufacturers pay “at a lower rate or for less time than the work actually took,” capped to the OEM’s published labor-time-allowance schedule (Trinity Warranty). Home-warranty administrators are worse — contractors report agreed fees getting cut to “60 or 70 percent” after the work is done (HVAC-Talk).

The paperwork is painful enough that a whole cottage industry exists to offload it: outsourced Warranty Processing Services BPOs, plus contractors openly billing homeowners a $50–$75 “warranty processing fee” just to handle the filing (HVAC-Talk processing-charges thread, Econo Air). People are already paying money to make this go away.

Why it’s buildable now: agentic document-reading and portal form-fill matured through 2025–26. An LLM can now read a work order, map the failure to the right OEM labor-schedule code, and drive a manufacturer claim portal — the exact drudgery that suppressed the 0.78% file rate.

Provenance:

• Signal 1 (Demand): HVAC warranty claim rate ~0.78% — most eligible claims never filed; 30–60 day deadlines void late claims; OEMs shortpay vs actual labor — HVAC Service Authority / Trinity Warranty — 2026-07-22
• Signal 2 (Feasibility): Agentic doc-reading + portal form-fill matured 2025–26; OEM claim portals still manual per brand — Product Hunt AI agents 2026 — 2026-07-22
• Signal 3 (Economic): HVAC service-management SW market $1.49B in 2026, 17.3% CAGR, inside a $152B US HVAC services market; ~70% of contractors run no modern platform — Global Growth Insights / Orbital — 2026-07-22 Category: Underserved niche

3. The opportunity

Warranty claims are a leak in every HVAC contractor’s P&L, and nobody owns the fix. The big field-service platforms (ServiceTitan, Housecall Pro) automate the reminder to register a unit but stop there — they don’t file the claim, they don’t track the deadline per brand, and they absolutely don’t audit whether the manufacturer shortpaid you. The other side of the market is human BPOs (Warranty Processing Services and friends) who charge per claim and are slow, opaque, and — critically — don’t have the margin structure to police OEM underpayment on a $180 labor line.

ClaimYard sits in that gap. It’s the back office that (1) knows every install’s registration and claim deadline by manufacturer, (2) reads the work order and auto-drafts + files the labor/parts claim into the correct OEM portal, and (3) reconciles what the OEM actually paid against its own published labor-time-allowance schedule and flags every shortfall so the contractor can dispute it. The 0.78% file rate is the whole thesis: a tool that pushes a $2M-revenue shop from filing 5% of claims to filing 90% is putting five-figure sums back on their books per year — from money that was already theirs.

Incumbent weakness, named: ServiceTitan chases enterprise and treats warranty as a checkbox; BPOs run on human labor so they file but don’t fight underpayment. Neither closes the loop.

4. Target market

• Primary customer: US independent HVAC (and adjacent plumbing) contractors, 3–25 techs, $1M–$10M annual revenue, running warranty repairs on Carrier / Trane / Goodman-Daikin / Lennox / Rheem equipment. Sweet spot is the shop big enough to have real claim volume but too small to have a dedicated warranty administrator.
• Why they buy: “I know I’m leaving money on the table but I don’t have time to chase it, and when I do file, they shortchange me anyway.” The pain is felt on every warranty repair, weekly-to-daily in season.
• Rough TAM reasoning: ~120,000 HVAC contracting firms in the US; even the 3–25-tech band is tens of thousands of shops. ~70% run no modern field-service platform — a wide-open install base (Orbital). Capturing 2,000 shops at ~$4K ACV is an $8M ARR business inside a $152B services market.
• Why now for them: Manufacturers keep tightening portal requirements and labor-allowance schedules; labor costs are up, so the gap between “what the repair cost me” and “what the OEM paid” is more visible than ever. And the tooling to automate the filing finally exists.

5. Product sketch (MVP)

• Deadline radar: every installed/serviced unit tracked against its manufacturer’s registration and claim windows, with escalating alerts as the 30–60 day clock runs down.
• Auto-draft claim: reads the work order / invoice, pulls model + serial + failure, maps it to the correct OEM labor-time-allowance code, and produces a ready-to-submit claim.
• Portal filing: submits into the right manufacturer portal (start with the top 3–4 brands by the shop’s volume), or hands a one-click packet to the office manager where a portal can’t be driven directly.
• Shortpay auditor: reconciles the OEM’s actual payment against the published labor/parts allowance and flags every underpayment with the dispute-ready delta.
• Recovery dashboard: dollars filed, dollars paid, dollars shortpaid, dollars still recoverable — the number the owner actually cares about.
• QuickBooks/FSM sync: pulls jobs in, pushes reimbursements back so warranty income stops being invisible.
• Monthly “money left on the table” report the owner can wave at their team.

6. AI angle — what’s load-bearing

Remove the AI and this is a spreadsheet with reminders — which is exactly what already fails at a 0.78% file rate. The load-bearing AI work is: (1) reading messy, unstructured work orders and invoices and extracting the model/serial/failure/labor facts, (2) mapping a plain-English failure (“blower motor, replaced under warranty, 1.5 hrs”) to the specific OEM’s labor-time-allowance code — a fuzzy classification that differs per manufacturer, and (3) driving heterogeneous, ugly OEM claim portals via agentic form-fill. The shortpay auditor is the compounding piece: matching each payment line back to the right schedule entry at scale is drudgery no human BPO does line-by-line, and it’s where the recovered dollars come from.

7. Localization angle (if any)

N/A — this is a US-first play. The wedge is the fragmentation of US manufacturer portals and labor-allowance schedules (Carrier, Trane, Goodman-Daikin, Lennox, Rheem). That per-OEM knowledge is the moat and it doesn’t transfer cleanly to other geographies. A Canada extension is plausible later (same brands), but forcing an India/SEA angle here would be inventing a market that isn’t the one bleeding money.

8. Business model — path to $1M–$5M ARR

• Pricing: hybrid. Base SaaS $199–$399/mo per shop for deadline tracking + auto-draft, plus a success fee of ~10–15% on recovered shortpay the auditor claws back. The success fee aligns to money that was otherwise lost, so it’s easy to say yes to.
• ACV: ~$3,500–$5,000/yr blended (base + recovery share) for a mid-size shop.
• Rough math to $1M ARR: ~250 shops × ~$4K ACV = $1M. Reachable in year one from a single well-worked channel.
• Rough math to $5M ARR: ~1,200 shops × ~$4.2K, or fewer shops with higher recovery share as brand coverage deepens. Requires covering the top ~5 OEM portals reliably and proving the shortpay recovery number in case studies.
• Expansion path: more OEM brands → more claims captured; add plumbing/electrical warranty lines; add the multi-branch tier; eventually sell aggregate labor-allowance benchmarking (“you’re being paid 12% below peer shops by Brand X”).

9. Go-to-market wedge — first 100 customers

• Free “recovery audit” as the hook: offer to run a shop’s last 12 months of warranty repairs through the shortpay auditor and hand back a one-page “here’s the money you left on the table” report. The number sells the product. Target 200 shops, expect a strong close rate on any shop where the number is >$5K.
• Trade forums where they already vent: HVAC-Talk and r/HVAC / r/hvacadvice threads about warranty processing and reimbursement rates are active and specific — engage there, then DM shop owners who complain about shortpay directly.
• Distributor & rep partnerships: local HVAC distributors and manufacturer reps already sit between contractors and OEMs; a rev-share referral gets warm intros to exactly the shops with volume.
• Ride the “processing fee” wedge: contractors already charge homeowners $50–75 to process warranties — pitch ClaimYard as “keep charging that fee, we do the work, you keep the margin.”
• State/regional HVAC contractor associations: sponsor one regional trade event, run the free audit at the booth.

10. Build complexity — justification

Medium. Off-the-shelf: doc-reading/extraction, LLM classification, standard web/SaaS stack, QuickBooks integration. The custom work is real but bounded — encoding each OEM’s labor-time-allowance schedule and building resilient portal automation for the top 3–5 manufacturers, which are ugly and change. A small team ships a credible v1 (2–3 brands, deadline radar + auto-draft + audit) in ~4 months; the moat deepens brand by brand after that. The portal-automation fragility is the main engineering tax.

11. Gating checklist

Gate	Pass?	Note
Legal in target market	✅	Filing claims on the contractor’s behalf; disclosed processing fees already legal.
Ethical — no harm / dark patterns	✅	Recovers money legitimately owed to the contractor; auditing OEM shortpay is pro-fairness.
Market exists (evidence above)	✅	0.78% file rate, $50–75 processing fees, existing BPOs — money is already moving.
1–5 person team can build this	✅	Medium build; core is doc-reading + per-OEM schedules + portal fill.
Launchable with <$50K / ₹40L	✅	Standard SaaS costs; no capex, no inventory.

All five pass.

12. Feasibility score

Axis	Weight	Score	Notes
Problem intensity	20	16/20	Felt on every warranty repair; real dollars lost weekly. Not “hair on fire” daily-emergency, but a chronic, quantifiable leak owners already know about.
Demand evidence	15	12/15	Hard 0.78% file rate, documented shortpay, existing BPOs, $50–75 processing fees. Strong. Docked for lack of a direct “I’d pay $X/mo for exactly this” quote.
Build feasibility	15	10/15	Doc-reading and classification are easy; per-OEM labor schedules + fragile portal automation are the honest tax.
Distribution clarity	15	12/15	Free-recovery-audit hook is concrete and self-qualifying; named forums and distributor channel. Conversion math still unproven.
Revenue mechanics	15	12/15	Benchmarked pricing, success-fee aligns to recovered money, clean path to $1M. Success-fee collection/attribution is a wrinkle.
Time to first revenue	10	7/10	Audit-led sell can close in weeks once 2–3 brands are covered, but coverage must exist first.
Defensibility	10	5/10	Moat = accumulated per-OEM schedule + portal knowledge + recovery data. Copyable by a determined competitor; head start + brand depth is the defense.
Total	100	74/100

13. Qualitative modifiers

Founder-fit tags

technical-heavy · domain-expertise-required — needs someone who can build resilient portal automation and someone who knows how HVAC warranty claims actually work (an ex-warranty-admin or ops-savvy contractor as advisor is close to mandatory).

Key assumptions to validate (3–5)

1. Assumption: The average target shop is leaving ≥$10K/yr in filable + shortpaid warranty money on the table. How to test: run the free recovery audit on 15–20 shops’ last-12-months data and measure the recoverable number.
2. Assumption: OEM claim portals can be automated (or semi-automated with a human-in-the-loop packet) reliably enough for the top 3 brands. How to test: build the filing flow for Carrier + Goodman-Daikin + Trane and file 25 real claims.
3. Assumption: Contractors will accept a 10–15% success fee on recovered shortpay. How to test: price-test the hybrid model against 30 owners after showing them their audit number.
4. Assumption: Shortpay is common and disputable enough to be a headline feature, not a footnote. How to test: reconcile 100 paid claims against published schedules and measure shortfall frequency and average delta.

Risk flags

1. Platform dependency: the product drives third-party OEM portals; a manufacturer changing its portal or blocking automation breaks a brand overnight. Mitigate with human-in-the-loop packet fallback.
2. Incumbent reaction: ServiceTitan/Housecall Pro could bolt on warranty filing. But shortpay auditing is off-thesis for them and the SMB 70% aren’t their customers, so there’s runway.
3. Attribution on success fee: proving ClaimYard caused a recovered dollar (vs the contractor filing anyway) can get contentious; may need to lean more on flat SaaS and treat recovery share as upside.
4. Market timing: if manufacturers move to auto-adjudicated/instant claims, the filing pain shrinks — though shortpay auditing survives that shift.

14. Structured verdict

Score:                  74/100
Verdict:                GO
Confidence:             Medium
Best-fit builder:       Technical founder + HVAC warranty-admin domain advisor
Time to revenue:        8–12 weeks (once 2–3 OEM brands are covered)
Capital to launch:      $15–30K ($15-30K)
Top 3 assumptions to validate first:
  1. Recoverable money per shop ≥$10K/yr — free recovery audit on 15–20 shops
  2. Top-3 OEM portals automatable enough to file reliably — build + file 25 real claims
  3. Owners accept 10–15% success fee on recovered shortpay — price-test 30 owners post-audit
Kill criteria:
  - Abandon if median recoverable number across 20 audited shops is <$4K/yr (no compelling ROI)
  - Abandon if top-2 OEM portals actively block automation with no viable human-in-the-loop packet

15. Next step — 1-week validation sprint

• Day 1–2: Get 12-month warranty-repair exports (or read-only FSM/QuickBooks access) from 5 friendly HVAC shops. Manually reconcile against Carrier + Goodman-Daikin + Trane published labor-allowance schedules.
• Day 3–4: Produce a one-page “money left on the table” report per shop: unfiled claims + shortpaid deltas, in dollars. Walk each owner through it and pitch the hybrid pricing.
• Day 5: Decide go / no-go on a falsifiable bar: ≥3 of 5 shops show ≥$8K/yr recoverable AND ≥2 verbally commit to a paid pilot at the proposed pricing. If the dollar numbers are small or owners shrug, kill it — the whole thesis rests on the recoverable number being big enough to sell itself.