If you look at our catalog, you’ll see several tools. Look closer and you’ll see something else: a handful of engines, each doing one job well, tweaked to an industry or a role (and yes, they all have been built to include an MCP layer that can be leveraged, if needed, but I digress).
That’s not a marketing line. It’s how the product is actually built.
The same, but different…
The Compressor — our estimating and quoting engine — ships as three separate products today: estimating for software, construction, and consulting (respectively). Same rate-card structure, same draft-quote generation, same save/edit/export flow underneath. What changes is the vocabulary, the rate structure, and the tailored scope for the intended user.
The Sifter — our RAAID project tracker, which pulls risks, actions, assumptions, issues, and dependencies out of raw text — ships as a general tracker and as a construction-inspection tracker that turns site reports into assignable findings tailored to the intended specialist.
Compass — our project-plan generator — ships for research engagements and for standard projects.
Three engines, five industry-native products. The others — e.g., Strategic Partner, Governance, PO/Invoice Reconciliation — don’t change by industry. Strategy, Governance, and Finance/Accounts Payable are universal.
Why this matters more than it sounds like it should
Most software companies tell you they’re “flexible” or “built to scale into new verticals.” It’s usually a hope, not a fact — the first real vertical build reveals how much of the original product has to be torn up to fit.
We didn’t have to make that claim. We shipped the second and third skins on engines that already existed, without rewriting them. There’s a documented pattern internally for exactly this — spin up a net-new industry variant as a single self-contained tool that can be provisioned by end users à la carte (or AI-la-carte), without touching the shared core. It’s boring infrastructure. It’s also the reason three estimating products and two tracking products exist without three separate codebases behind them. Like I said, Ai-la-carte for YOUR business… not ours.
What this means for you
If your work doesn’t map neatly onto “construction” or “software,” that’s fine — five of these ten tools were never built for one industry in the first place. And if your work does map onto a specific vertical, the fact that we’ve already done this twice is the reason we can credibly say a version built around your industry’s language is a near-term thing, not a maybe-someday thing.
Over the next few weeks, we’re going to walk through what each tool actually does, one at a time — some in plain, industry-neutral terms, some in the language of the trade they were built for. This post was the map. The rest is the territory. Let’s go!
Backshack is a suite of à la carte AI tools. This post is the first in a short series about how the catalog is actually built and who each tool is for.