HorseBook Business: Running a Stallion as a Business

By Brian Bickell, who builds HorseBook from a ranch in Oklahoma.

As of October 14, HorseBook's top plan has a new name. The plan called Breeder since July is now HorseBook Business, for people whose horses are a business, starting with the stallion operation. The features and the prices are the same: $39.99 a month or $399.99 a year, with existing subscribers carried over as they are.

The name changes this week because contracts went live this week. A stallion service agreement is now written from the booking, sent as a link and signed on the mare owner's phone. With contracts in place beside the stallion book and the fee schedules, the plan covers a stallion's deal from the booking to the signature to the final balance, which is what running a stallion as a business takes.

What Business Runs Today

Business is everything in Pro, plus the stallion operation, organized the way a season's deals move.

• The book. Outside mares booked to the stallion, each with the mare owner, the schedule, the shipment, the guarantee and remedy, and the result. A per-stallion season template sets the year's contract terms once, compatibility notes record the crosses under consideration, and a program summary rolls up the stallion's year.
• Collections. Each semen collection, with video when there is one, freezing logs for frozen semen, and a record of which mares each collection shipped to.
• The money. A booking breaks into a fee schedule: deposit and balance parts, each with its due trigger and the farm's own payment link. Each payment is recorded with its date and method, and the mare owner gets a read-only invoice link showing what is due, what is paid and what is left. HorseBook never processes or holds the money; the mare owner pays the farm directly.
• The contract. A stallion service agreement generated from the booking, with every clause editable, sent as a link the mare owner signs in her phone's browser with no account. The booking shows when it is signed. A farm with its own contract uploads it once on the web, HorseBook proposes where the blanks go, the owner approves the placement, and every booking fills it in from then on. A contract signed on paper can be uploaded onto the booking.
• Scans. 1,000 document scans a month, against 200 on Pro and 20 on Hobby, shared across Smart Upload, bulk extraction and quick entry.

How a contract travels from booking to signed copy, including the farm's own PDF and the paper path, is laid out in Sign a Stallion Breeding Contract Online. The step-by-step, with every check that runs before a contract can be sent, is in the help article Send a contract to sign.

Three Plans, and Who Each Is For

HorseBook comes in three plans. Hobby is for owners with a few horses of their own. Pro is for barns caring for many horses, including boarded, leased-in and client horses. Business is for horse businesses, starting with the stallion operation.

	Hobby	Pro	Business
Who it's for	A few horses of one's own	A barn full of horses to care for	Horse businesses, starting with the stallion operation
Price	$4.99/month	$9.99/month or $99.99/year	$39.99/month or $399.99/year
Horses	Up to 3	Unlimited	Unlimited
Health, vaccines, farrier, care plans, calendar, documents	✓	✓	✓
Mare side: heat cycles, breeding, pregnancy checks, foaling, foals	✓	✓	✓
Document scans a month	20	200	1,000
Boarded, leased-in and client horses	—	✓	✓
Farm locations	—	✓	✓
Herd and horse reports to print and export; archiving	—	✓	✓
Stallion book: collections, freezing logs, shipments, outside-mare bookings, seasons	—	—	✓
Fee schedules with the farm's own payment link; shareable invoices	—	—	✓
Contracts signed by link; the farm's own contract	—	—	✓

The annual plans run about 17% below twelve monthly payments. The full breakdown is on the pricing page.

The Mare Side Is on Every Plan

Breeding a mare is not a Business feature. Heat cycles, breedings, pregnancy checks, foaling and foal records are on every plan, Hobby included, and that holds when the mare is bred to the farm's own stallion. A farm that breeds its own mares and stands no stallion to outside mares has the mare side it needs on Pro, or on Hobby with three horses or fewer. Collection and freezing records for the farm's own stallion are part of Business. Business starts to matter when the farm stands a stallion to other people's mares and sends them the contract and the invoice.

On iPhone and the Web

Business works in the iPhone app and on the web, and the two sync. On iPhone the stallion book, the fee schedule and the contract live on the stallion and on each booking; generating a contract, signing and sending it, and seeing it signed work on both. Uploading the farm's own contract and approving where its blanks go is done on the web, and from then on the iPhone app fills it in from a booking like any other contract. The mare owner needs neither: her sign page and her invoice open in a browser. Until the next iPhone update, the app still calls the plan Breeder.

The stallion operation is the first business HorseBook runs end to end, and Business is where HorseBook builds for horse businesses next. A new account starts with a 14-day free trial that includes every Business feature, and no card is required to start it.

I built the stallion side for the bookkeeping and paperwork a breeding season generates, and contracts were the last piece of it still living in an email thread. If something about running your stallion as a business still lives outside HorseBook, tell me at brian@horsebook.app. That's how most of this got built.