Coast is a nice app. If you landed here, you have probably used it or trialed it and you are weighing whether the chat-and-coordination layer is worth the per-user tiers for what your crew actually does. For a small equipment crew, the answer is often no — not because Coast is bad, but because you need less than it offers and you are paying by the head for the parts you do not use.
This is the honest take. Coast is good at team coordination. EquipHours strips the problem down to the maintenance log and hour-based alerts, and bills by machine instead of by person.
What Coast does
Coast is a mobile-first maintenance and work-order app with chat-style team coordination. Pricing changes, so check their site for current numbers, but the model is a per-user free tier plus paid per-user tiers, and the selling point is keeping a team in sync — messaging, task assignment, and maintenance in one place. That is genuinely helpful when coordination is the hard part of your day.
If your bottleneck is people not knowing who is doing what, Coast solves that well.
When coordination is not the bottleneck
For a lot of small equipment crews, coordination is not the hard part. Everybody already knows the plan — they talk at the truck in the morning. The hard part is that nobody writes down the hours, the oil changes slip, and a machine grenades a hydraulic pump because the service got missed three months ago.
That problem does not need a chat thread. It needs a fast log and an alert. EquipHours does the log and the alert and stops there, on purpose. Less to learn, less to ignore, less to pay for.
When you strip out the coordination layer, the per-user math stops making sense too. Per-user billing makes sense when every user is a paid technician closing work orders. It makes no sense when your users are a seasonal operator who runs a mower for ten weeks, a part-time guy on big jobs, and your brother-in-law on the Bobcat on weekends. You want all of them logging hours. Per-seat pricing punishes that, so you share a login, and shared logins kill accountability.
Whole-crew logging without per-user math
EquipHours is built so the entire crew logs without anyone watching the seat count. Invite by email or QR, everyone gets their own name, owner and crew roles, and the bill never moves because you added a person. It moves only when you add machines past a tier:
- Free — $0, 2 machines
- Crew — $14.99/mo, 15 machines
- Fleet — $39.99/mo, unlimited machines
Annual options exist. So the seasonal hire and the weekend borrower both log under their own names at zero marginal cost, and you get real accountability instead of one shared account nobody owns.
Side by side
| EquipHours | Coast | |
|---|---|---|
| Built for | Small equipment crews, maintenance logging | Team maintenance with chat coordination |
| Core function | Maintenance log + hour-based alerts | Coordination, tasks, work orders, messaging |
| Pricing model | By machine count, no per-user fee | Per-user free tier + per-user paid tiers |
| Offline logging | Yes, offline-first, syncs later | Mobile work-order app |
| Team chat | No | Yes, core feature |
| Work orders | No | Yes |
| Best fit | Crews that need the log, not the chatter | Teams where coordination is the problem |
What you give up
Honest about the tradeoffs:
- No team chat. EquipHours is not where your crew messages each other. Keep using whatever you already use for that.
- No work orders. It logs services; it does not assign and close tickets.
- No task coordination layer. It tracks machine maintenance, not who is doing which job today.
If team coordination inside the app is the thing you actually want, Coast is the better fit.
What you get in return
- A maintenance log that's fast enough to actually get used — Quick Log: tap machine, big numpad for the meter, pick the service, save, under thirty seconds.
- Hour-based service intervals with green/yellow/red status, email alerts on newly-overdue intervals, and push notifications.
- Offline-first logging that syncs later with duplicate protection — built for job sites without signal.
- Per-machine pricing and individual accountability for the whole crew with no per-seat fee.
- Receipt photos on services and per-machine maintenance schedules for 40 popular machines, including generators and tractors.
Less app, on purpose
There is a temptation to pick the tool that does the most. More features feel like more value. But an app you have to manage is an app your crew has to learn, and every feature you do not use is still in the way of the one you do. Coast's coordination layer is real value if you need coordination. If you do not, it is overhead you scroll past to get to the log.
EquipHours is deliberately small. It logs maintenance and it warns you before a machine goes overdue. That is the whole job. The payoff for keeping it small is that a new seasonal hire can be logging correctly five minutes after you send the QR invite, with no training session and no chance of getting lost in features that do not apply to him.
Accountability without a shared login
The quiet failure mode for small crews is the shared login. It happens because per-user pricing makes individual accounts feel expensive, so the crew logs in as one account and nobody owns anything. Then a service gets logged wrong, or not at all, and there is no way to know who was on the machine.
EquipHours removes the reason for that. Every person logs under their own name at no extra cost, with owner and crew roles, invited by email or QR. When you look at a machine's history, you see who logged what and when. That is real accountability, and it costs the same as if one person did all the logging — because you pay for machines, not heads.
When Coast is the better choice
Stick with Coast, not EquipHours, when:
- Coordinating your team is genuinely the hard part of the day.
- You want messaging and maintenance living in the same app.
- You use work orders to assign and close tasks.
- Your crew benefits more from staying in sync than from a faster log.
Those are good reasons, and EquipHours deliberately does not compete on them. It wins when the crew just needs the log done and the alerts firing, billed by machine. If your real comparison is against a full CMMS instead of a coordination app, the UpKeep alternative page covers that case.
Try it on your own machines
Start free with 2 machines, no credit card. Put your two busiest machines in, log a week of hours, and see whether the log and the alerts were all you needed. Check pricing and features, grab the free equipment maintenance log template, and sign up at /app/register.