Introducing the Breeder Plan: Booking Bookkeeping for Stallion Owners

By Brian Bickell, who builds HorseBook from a ranch in Oklahoma and stands his own studs — so the bookkeeping this fixes is bookkeeping I do myself.

Updated August 2026: when this plan launched it was the billing toolkit alone. As of the August release, Breeder carries the whole stallion book — bookings, collections and shipments, freezing logs, mare compatibility notes, and the season summary — plus 1,000 AI scans a month. The post below reflects what the plan is now.

I raise paint and quarter horses at Bickell Ranches, and part of that is standing a stallion. Which means every breeding season I'm not just managing horses — I'm running a small business with a dozen customers, each one owing money at different points, on different terms, for different mares. A booking deposit here. A balance due at shipment there. One that only comes due if the mare's confirmed in foal by fall. Collection fees, shipping, mare care board. It adds up to a mess of little amounts on little deadlines, and I was tracking it the way most stallion owners do: a spreadsheet, some texts, and a nagging feeling I'd forgotten to invoice somebody.

So I built the tool I needed. It's a plan called Breeder, and it's the stallion side of HorseBook — the stallion book and the billing that goes with it, sitting on top of everything the app already does.

What it does

Breeder is everything in Pro, plus the stallion book and the money tools built around how a breeding season actually runs.

The stallion book:

Bookings and the mare book. Every mare booked to your stud, with her status — pending, confirmed, completed — her owner's contact info, the method you agreed to, and compatibility notes for the crosses you're weighing. When a mare owner calls, you pull up their mare and see the whole arrangement.
Collections, freezing logs, and shipments. Each collection with the date, volume, and doses — video attached if you take one — and each shipment tied to the mare it went to, carrier and tracking included. "Did it ship?" gets answered in one tap.
The season summary. The whole year rolled up per stallion — mares booked, settled versus decided, outcomes. Next spring when somebody asks how he did last year, you answer from numbers.

The money:

Fee schedules with deposit and balance parts. Break a booking into pieces — a booking deposit up front, balances that come due at signing, at shipment, when she's confirmed in foal, on a live foal, whatever your contract says. Each part knows what it is and when it's due.
Your own payment links. Attach the link you already use — Stripe, Venmo, PayPal, whatever your mare owners pay you through. HorseBook doesn't replace how you get paid; it just puts the link where the invoice is.
One-tap mark-paid. When the money lands, mark that part paid. The booking's balance updates, and you always know what's outstanding.
Read-only invoices you share with mare owners. Send a mare owner a clean, read-only view of their booking — what's due, what's paid, what's left. No login, no app to download on their end. Just the invoice.

And because a breeding season generates paper like nothing else, Breeder raises the AI scan cap to 1,000 scans a month — five times Pro.

That's the whole thing. If you keep a stallion book — and I wrote a full guide to what belongs in one — this is that book, the mares and the money both, finally in one place.

What it deliberately does not do

Here's the part I care most about, and the part I want to be plain about: HorseBook never processes or holds your money.

Your mare owners pay you directly, through your own payment link. The money goes from them to you, and HorseBook is never in the middle of it. I'm not a payment processor, I don't want to be one, and I don't want to be holding a stallion owner's stud fees in some account waiting to pay out. You keep your own payment relationship, your own terms, your own money. The app keeps the books.

I made that call on purpose. The second a record-keeping app starts holding funds, it's a different kind of company with a different kind of risk, and that's not what you signed up for or what I'm good at. Breeder tracks the money. It doesn't touch it.

Who it's for — and who it isn't

Breeder is for stallion owners running a breeding business. If you're standing a stud, booking mares, and invoicing owners on staged terms, this is the plan that pays for itself the first time it catches a balance you'd have forgotten to collect.

If you're mare-side only, you don't need Breeder. I want to be honest about this, because the last thing I want is somebody paying for a plan they don't need. If you're breeding your mares, tracking cycles and pregnancies and foaling, keeping your foals' registration paperwork straight — all of that lives on every plan, and it's the breeding documentation most breeders actually use. That includes breeding her to your own stallion and following the pregnancy through. The stallion book and the invoicing only matter when you're the one standing the stud and sending the invoices. Mare owners don't need them. Stallion owners do.

The plan

Breeder is $39.99 a month, or $399.99 a year — the annual runs about 17% cheaper, roughly $33.33 a month if you pay up front. It's everything in Pro plus the stallion book, the billing toolkit, and the 1,000-scan cap, on both the iPhone app and the web dashboard. The full breakdown, next to Hobby and Pro, is on the pricing page.

One more thing worth saying plainly: if you ever step down a plan, your records don't vanish. Everything you entered — the bookings, the collections, the fee schedules — stays right there, readable, and you can still mark an existing charge paid while your subscription's active. You just can't add new stallion-book records without the plan. Your data is yours; that's not a place I'm willing to squeeze.

If you've been keeping your stallion's season in a spreadsheet and chasing balances by text, this is the thing I built to stop doing that myself. It's live now for anyone standing a stud on HorseBook.

And if there's something about running your breeding business it still doesn't handle, tell me. That's how most of the app got built — including this.

Brian Bickell is the founder of HorseBook and raises paint and quarter horses at Bickell Ranches in Stillwater, Oklahoma.