Alex Host

I'm Alex Host. I run Top Care Cleaning in Grand Rapids, Michigan — a family cleaning business my dad and uncle started in 1980. Forty-five years in, I'm the third generation working in it: accounting, marketing, supervision, and a hundred other things that don't show up on a job description.

I started building software because every tool I tried as a small-business owner was either overpriced or built for companies ten times my size. Podium wanted $399 a month. Birdeye wanted $299. CHIIRP wanted $300–$800. None of them were built for someone like me — a guy who knows what it costs to acquire a customer with a truck-mounted carpet extractor and a 30-foot ladder.

So I started building the software I wished existed. Not as a venture-backed startup, not as a tech company. As a cleaning company owner who got tired of getting ripped off.

What I'm building

Hosted Brands is the umbrella. Underneath it: six SaaS apps for local service businesses, two faith-based products under Hosted Faith, and the cleaning business that started it all. Every app makes the next one more valuable — a 5-star review becomes a postcard becomes a landing page visit becomes an attributed lead.

I write about it every Tuesday in From Mops to Micro-SaaS. The newsletter is operator-meta: real numbers, real code, real failures, real lessons running multiple sites at once while still running the cleaning business.

Why public

I'm building in public because more business owners should see what's possible. There's a generation of people running family service businesses who think software is something other people make. It isn't. The barrier dropped years ago — most of us just haven't noticed.

How to follow along

• Join the newsletter — Tuesdays, free forever
• Read the blog — operator-meta posts about the build
• Browse the portfolio — every site, app, and business
• Get the Playbook — the 16-page Suite Playbook on signup
• Email: [email protected]