How SnuggPro helps contractors increase energy upgrades by 25%

SnuggPro is a cloud-based energy auditing and productivity tool. It allows home performance professionals to enter information about an audited house and receive estimates about possible savings. As a result, homeowners can save energy, reduce their carbon footprint, and sometimes even improve health and safety issues.

SnuggPro works with about 600 companies that perform about 3,000 energy audits per month. Each audit is a potential energy upgrade. The app helps increase the conversion rate by leveraging rich, customizable homeowner reports that can be created in minutes.

To create an app that would truly meet user needs, SnuggPro’s founders analyzed those needs firsthand. The team went on numerous field visits with contractors, attended conferences, and beta tested with potential users. Additionally, interviews with homeowners helped identify friction points in the sales process. After the initial research, the team focused on building an intuitive, web-based application with powerful reporting features.

Creating compelling and customizable reports would help energy auditors turn assessments into upgrades. The users needed to generate reports very quickly as they walked through the house and entered the information.

Images are an essential part of every SnuggPro report. During each audit, home professionals take pictures that go to the homeowner report. The app needed to accept and optimize photos of any size and format, and do it on the fly.

To make things even more complicated, SnuggPro has an extremely small team. There are only three co-founders and one full-time engineer. For them, it’s crucial to spend their time wisely and focus on domain-specific priorities. Building an image-handling system from scratch would have been akin to reinventing the wheel.

SnuggPro had limited resources, so they required an out-of-the-box maintenance-free solution they could easily integrate and forget about. This way the company could save money and precious developer time.

The SnuggPro team was looking for an infrastructure that would meet these requirements:

Ease of use is one of SnuggPro’s main competitive advantages. The ideal solution would look like a natural part of the app.

Automatically adjusting image compression would accelerate uploads even on slow mobile connections.

SnuggPro is a full-stack JavaScript application. The team was looking for a widget provided as a JavaScript library.

SnuggPro started using Uploadcare back in 2011, in the early days of both companies. The team implemented the File Uploader to replace a temporary homegrown solution.

SnuggPro’s users take and upload images on the go while walking around the audited house. For them it’s crucial that the app is reliable and easy to use. Uploadcare File Uploader has an intuitive tab-based interface, so even non-tech-savvy users can feel comfortable using it. The widget is responsive and mobile-ready, which makes it user friendly on any device.

Uploadcare File Uploader is highly customizable, and SnuggPro leverages many of its options. The team enabled client-side image resizing to avoid serving full-resolution pictures. The end users can upload multiple files from various sources and use drag & drop for convenience. Once an image has been uploaded, they can rotate, crop, and enhance it, whether on a desktop or mobile device.

SnuggPro relies on Uploadcare for delivering all types of files, not just images. All the content shared in the chat inside the app is handled by Uploadcare. Plus, the team is planning to use it with a new support ticket system. Having a battle-tested solution saves the company from reinventing the wheel whenever they need a file-handling infrastructure.

Uploadcare helped SnuggPro’s users generate visually compelling reports in minutes. It enabled home auditors to easily drop images into the app without bothering to modify them first.

Home professionals leverage SnuggPro’s reports to build customer awareness and generate compelling proposals. Along with the ease of use, powerful reporting features gave the app a strong competitive edge.

SnuggPro was founded in an attempt to support contractors and increase the number of energy upgrades performed in the US. According to the company's clients, this attempt was successful. A survey of SnuggPro’s users showed that the app allowed them to save between 1 to 3 hours per job, while increasing the sales conversion rate by an average of 25%.

Uploadcare fully automated media management for SnuggPro, saving the company hundreds of hours of precious developer time. The team integrated an out-of-the-box infrastructure, and the users instantly got the functionality they were looking for.

As a web-based SaaS provider, SnuggPro uses a continuous delivery model with new releases two to three times per week. With only four workers on a full-time basis, promptly updating the product is already challenging enough, and the team simply has no time for maintaining file-handling infrastructure. Uploadcare took on all the maintenance and backups, allowing SnuggPro’s developers to focus on the main functionality.

Uploadcare is an end-to-end cloud platform that provides a next-gen infrastructure for file handling. It can cover any part of the media pipeline or all of them at once: