Your crew shows up
at five. Your software
should already be there.
Fairway is club and labor management for the courses nobody built software for — the public, the municipal, the semi-private. Crew scheduling, a job board that proves the work got done, a time clock that knows where the shop is, and a course map your whole operation hangs off.
The demo is a real course with a real Tuesday in it. No form, no sales call.
Job board
Sources: National Golf Foundation facility count (2025); USGA Green Section superintendent survey; GCSAA / industry labor reporting. Figures rounded. See why Fairway exists for the full picture.
Golf's best software was built for the seventeen percent.
Jonas and Clubessential are genuinely good products. They're also built, priced and sold for private country clubs — quote-only contracts that start around $500–$600 a month and climb into five figures, with an implementation project attached.
Meanwhile about three quarters of American golf facilities are public or daily-fee. A municipal 18 with a crew of fourteen and a superintendent who also runs the shop doesn't need a quarter-long implementation. It needs to know who's coming in tomorrow, which bunkers still need raking, and whether the sprayer's licence expired.
So those courses run on a whiteboard, a group text, a spreadsheet nobody else can open, and one person's memory. Fairway is the thing that fits in between.
- Free until you outgrow it — not free until the trial ends
- Works on the phone in a glove, at 5am, in the fog
- Imports whatever your last system produced — including a photo of the board
- No implementation project. A morning, and you're running
- Labor57%
- Fertilizer, seed & chemicals14%
- Equipment & fuel12%
- Irrigation & water9%
- Everything else8%
Labor share per published industry reporting; remaining lines are a representative split for an 18-hole facility, not a survey result.
An 18-hole course spends roughly $500,000–$1,000,000 a year on maintenance. If labor is 57% of it, every hour scheduled badly, clocked wrong, or spent driving back for a tool comes out of the same pocket that pays for seed and fuel.
Fairway won't fix the labor market. It will tell you on Tuesday that Saturday is two people short, and let you ask the course down the road before it's a crisis.
Every job, every zone, and proof it happened.
Jobs live on the board by crew, tied to a place on the course. A crew member opens their phone, works the checklist, takes the photo, and it's done — with the minutes it actually took, not the minutes you guessed.
- Checklists per job, so a new hire knows what 'raked' means here
- Photo proof attached to the job, not lost in a group text
- Estimated vs. actual minutes, quietly building a real time standard
- Weather holds appear on the job itself — not as a separate thing to remember
Job board
Build the week in the time it takes to drink a coffee.
Drag a shift, publish the week, and everyone gets it. Open shifts show as open — and when Saturday is short, Fairway says so on Tuesday instead of at 5am Saturday.
- Publish once; the crew sees their week on their phone
- Open shifts are visible to the people who could pick them up
- Running labor cost as you build, so the week doesn't surprise payroll
- Understaffed days flagged against your own history, not a generic rule
Schedule
One map. Every layer reads off it.
Give Fairway an aerial image or a scan of the yardage book and it drafts your holes, greens, bunkers, cart paths and irrigation zones. You correct what it got wrong — and then everything else in the product has somewhere to point.
- Jobs pin to a zone, so 'what's outstanding and where' is one glance
- Spray applications carry a live re-entry countdown on the map
- Mowing frequency and irrigation zones as switchable layers
- Satellite imagery of your real property, with your zones on the ground
Course map
Machines that tell you before they quit.
Hours, service intervals, what's down and why. On a tight capital budget, the difference between a mower lasting nine years and six is whether anybody wrote down the hours.
- Service intervals tracked per machine, flagged automatically
- Repair history and cost per machine, so replacement arguments have numbers
- A machine marked down can't be assigned to tomorrow's job
- Fuel and hour logs from the phone, in the shed, at the time
Fleet
| Machine | Make & model | Yr | Hours | Since service | Status | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Greens Mower #1 | Toro Greensmaster 3150-Q | 2019 | 3,184 | 105/250 | Ready | |
| Greens Mower #2 | Toro Greensmaster 3150-Q | 2017 | 4,620 | 284/250 | Service due | |
| Fairway Unit A | John Deere 6080A | 2021 | 1,985 | 168/400 | Ready | |
| Fairway Unit B | John Deere 6080A | 2015 | 6,740 | 168/400 | Down | Hydraulic line — parts on order |
| Rough Mower | Jacobsen HR600 | 2018 | 3,910 | 126/300 | Ready | |
| Sprayer | Toro Multi Pro 1750 | 2020 | 1,240 | 84/200 | Ready | |
| Utility Cart 1 | Club Car Carryall 500 | 2022 | 890 | 63/150 | Ready | |
| Utility Cart 2 | Club Car Carryall 500 | 2016 | 5,120 | 208/150 | Service due | |
| Aerator | Toro ProCore 648 | 2019 | 640 | 84/200 | Ready | |
| Compact Tractor | Kubota L3901 | 2014 | 4,480 | 126/300 | Ready | |
| Bunker Rake | Toro Sand Pro 5040 | 2017 | 2,210 | 84/200 | Ready |
Bring whatever the last system spat out.
A spreadsheet, a PDF export, a printed schedule you photographed in the shed. The importer reads it, proposes a mapping, marks every guess as a guess, and imports nothing until you confirm.
- Auto-detects the shape of exports from ForeUP, Club Prophet, Jonas and plain Excel
- Every uncertain column is labelled a guess and waits for a human
- Import windows stay open — trickle in old seasons whenever you like
- A photo of the whiteboard is a legitimate input, not a joke
Import
I matched 6 of 8 columns confidently. Two are guesses and I've marked them — nothing imports until you say so. STATUS_F holds three single letters I can't interpret; tell me what A, I and T mean and I'll map them.
| Their column | Fairway field | First value | Confidence | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| EMP_NAME | Name | Marcus Ohl | 99% | |
| EMP_EMAIL | mohl@birchrun.org | 99% | ||
| PAY_RT | Hourly rate | $26.00 → 2600¢ | 97% | |
| CREW_CD | Crew | GT → Greens & Tees | 91% | |
| HIRE_DT | Started | 04/12/2019 | 95% | |
| LIC_EXP | Certification expiry | 08/26/2026 | 72% | AI guess — confirm |
| STATUS_F | Choose a field | A / I / T | 41% | AI guess — confirm |
| EMP_NOTE | Notes | Backup spray tech | 88% |
Built for 4:52 in the morning.
The decisions that shape a golf course get made in the dark, in a truck, on a phone with the brightness down. So Fairway has a night mode that isn't an afterthought, targets you can hit with a glove on, and a morning brief that answers the four questions a superintendent asks before the coffee's done.
Morning brief
Good morning,
Tomás.
When you're ready for the front of house.
Most courses should start in the maintenance shed and stay there a while. When you do want the member side — tee times, dues, events, the grill room — it's the same app, the same map, and the same honest fee.
Real-time availability, waitlists, guest passes.
Invoices raise themselves each period. Joins prorate.
Sign-ups, flights, pairings, a live leaderboard.
Halfway house and patio, paid on the phone.
Real satellite ground, your zones, today's work on it.
Answers from your club's own words — not the internet's.
0.9% of what you collect through Fairway, plus Stripe's published rate, which we do not mark up. Your members' receipts carry your club's name — you're the merchant of record. And the fee is capped: base plus platform fee can never exceed $399 a month.
* Cards taken in person on a reader at the counter are charged the same rate, and that one is not capped. The cap covers money members send you through Fairway — dues and invoices. A till is a different shape of volume, and capping it would mean pricing a card reader into everybody's base, including the courses that never buy one. Counter takings are not counted toward the cap either, so buying a reader never shortens the headroom on your dues.
Book a tee time
We'll tell you where they're better, too.
Incumbent figures are from public reporting and reseller quotes; almost none of these vendors publish a price, which is itself the point. Where one of them genuinely beats us — and several do, on tee sheets and on POS depth — the comparison pages say so plainly.
You shouldn't pay us until we're worth something to you.
The free tier isn't a trial with a countdown. It's the whole maintenance product for a crew of twelve, indefinitely. When you outgrow it, the paid tiers are small, published numbers — and the platform fee on money you collect is capped so a busy month never costs more than the flat plan.
Everything the maintenance shed needs. Free, and not a trial.
For a crew that outgrew the whiteboard. Unlimited staff.
Add the member side: tee times, dues, events, the whole front of house.
Flat rate, no platform fee, several courses under one roof.
Worked example: a Clubhouse course collecting $50,000 in a month pays $149 base + $450 platform fee. The cap is $250, so even at $200,000 collected the fee stops there — and at that point the flat Championship plan is simply cheaper, which we'll tell you.
Is Fairway really free to start?
Yes. The Groundskeeper tier costs nothing, forever, for a crew of up to 12 — scheduling, the job board, the time clock, the fleet log, certifications and the course map. It isn't a trial and it doesn't need a card. We make money when you collect money through Fairway, and on paid tiers courses choose once they've outgrown the free one.
We're a municipal course with no budget. Does this actually work for us?
That's exactly who it's built for. About three quarters of American golf facilities are public or daily-fee, and most of them were never the target customer for Jonas or Clubessential. Fairway starts free, runs on a phone, and imports whatever your last system produced — including a photo of the whiteboard.
What does the platform fee actually cost?
0.9% of money you actually collect through Fairway, on top of Stripe's own published rate, which we don't mark up. Today that means invoices — dues, events, lockers, anything the club raises. Greens fees still go through whatever you use now, and a food order is a kitchen ticket rather than a charge, so neither is counted. On any metered tier the fee is capped so your base plus fees can never exceed the flat Championship price, and the cap is applied at the moment of the charge rather than reconciled afterwards. A busy month is never a punishment. One exception, and it's the only asterisk we have: a card tapped in person on a reader at the counter is the same 0.9% uncapped, and doesn't count toward the cap on everything else either.
How long does it take to get going?
A morning. Upload your staff list in any shape — spreadsheet, PDF, or a phone photo of the printed schedule — and the importer maps the columns, flags what it isn't sure about, and waits for you to confirm. Nothing imports until a human says so.
Does it work without cell signal on the back nine?
The crew app keeps working and syncs when signal comes back. Clock-ins, job completions and photos queue locally. The one thing that needs a live connection is the geofence check, and when it can't reach us it records the clock-in and flags it for the superintendent instead of blocking the person standing there.
Take the whiteboard down.
Start with your crew and tomorrow's jobs. It's free for a crew of twelve, it takes a morning, and nobody has to sit through a demo call to try it.