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.

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 new plan called Breeder, and it's the stallion-owner billing toolkit sitting on top of everything HorseBook already does.

What it does

Breeder is everything in Pro, plus a billing toolkit built around how stud fees actually get paid:

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.

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

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, Pro is plenty. 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 in Pro, and it's the breeding documentation most breeders actually use. The billing toolkit only matters when you're the one sending the invoices. Mare owners don't need it. 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 billing toolkit, on both the iPhone app and the web dashboard. The full breakdown, next to Hobby and Pro, is on the pricing page.

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.