The front desk, running on proof.

TheDoorman gives your staff back the hours that packages and paper notices eat — and writes down what happened in a log nobody can quietly edit, right down to the carrier's own delivery receipt. No hardware. No multi-week onboarding. It runs on the desk PC your lobby already has, live in about an hour.

Get your free board report See the live demo Run your building's numbers Email the founder

I worked the desk. I've logged a holiday wall of boxes into a paper book, slipped shut-off notices under a few hundred doors, and stood in a lobby while a resident swore a package never arrived — with nothing to show for myself but my own handwriting. TheDoorman is the tool I wanted on that desk: scan the label, the right resident is notified automatically, and every step lands in a tamper-evident record.

What it fixes

Three things every doorman building loses time and arguments to

Each one is answered with a record, not a promise.

Pain · Package chaos

The paper logbook and the shoebox of slips

Couriers stack boxes while the phone rings. Somebody logs it later — or doesn't. Residents call down all day asking "anything for 4B?"

Proof · Scan & notify

Snap the label. On-device OCR reads it, the resident is notified automatically on the channels they chose, and the carrier's delivery receipt comes back into the log. Pickup is recorded with who collected and when. Works offline; syncs when the desk is back online.

Pain · Notice drudgery

Door slips, elevator postings, a stale email list

A water shut-off means printing, folding, and an hour of walking floors — and half the building still says they never heard.

Proof · One-tap broadcasts

Emergency, maintenance, or general notices reach the whole building — or just the affected line — in one tap, on each resident's chosen channels, with delivery recorded per resident. Emergencies bypass quiet hours; routine notices respect them.

Pain · He-said-she-said

"Nobody told me." "It was never delivered."

A missing package or an un-announced visitor turns into staff word against resident word — and the manager inherits the argument.

Proof · The tamper-evident log

Every notification, visitor decision, and pickup is appended to a hash-chained, append-only ledger with signed exports and checkpoints. Edits don't go unseen. When there's a dispute, you hand the board a record — not a recollection.

The math

Priced against overtime hours, not "productivity"

Take a 150-unit doorman building handling ~30 packages a day. Scan-and-auto-notify saves about 2 minutes per package over the paper-log-and-phone-call routine, and each building-wide notice skips roughly an hour of door slips.

~34 hrsdesk time recovered per month (30 × 2min × 30d + 4 notices × 60min) ÷ 60

$375/mothe subscription 150 units × $2.50 (billed annually)

~8 hrsof avoided overtime covers the whole bill $375 ÷ $45/hr loaded

~0.06%of a 300-unit building's gross $700/mo ÷ (300 × $4,000 rent)

Every assumption above — packages per day, minutes saved, the loaded labor rate, the rent — is editable in the calculator, and the proposal it generates shows each formula line so a board treasurer can audit it on sight. If the desk recovers 34 hours and the board only credits 8, it has still paid for itself.

Run it with your building's numbers

Union-safe by construction Per-staff analytics don't exist by default — the server refuses to compute them unless the building opts in with written staff notice. 32BJ delegate letter included.

Offline-capable desk Intake saves on the device first and syncs when the connection returns — plus a printable outage runbook to tape under the desk.

You own your data Full export anytime, plus scheduled exports encrypted with a passphrase only you hold. If we vanish, you keep running — that's contractual.

No hardware No panels, no kiosks, no wiring. A browser on the existing desk PC — live in about an hour, not weeks.

Pricing

Per occupied unit. Tapered. Locked in writing.

Priced per occupied apartment per month, with a $99/building floor so small buildings stay viable and a marginal taper so big ones aren't overcharged for unit 301.

Per-unit monthly pricing by occupied-unit band and billing cycle
Occupied units (per agreement)	Billed annually	Billed monthly
First 200 units	$2.50 /unit/mo	$3.00 /unit/mo
Units 201–400	$2.00 /unit/mo	$2.40 /unit/mo
Units 401 and above	$1.50 /unit/mo	$1.80 /unit/mo
Per-building floor	$99 /building/mo

Bands are marginal, like tax brackets: a 500-unit portfolio pays 200 × $2.50 + 200 × $2.00 + 100 × $1.50 = $1,050/mo on annual billing. SMS is included — no per-message or carrier pass-through fees, in writing on the order form.

Founding partners — limited

$1.25/unit/mo for Year 1

For the first handful of NYC founding partners: 50% off list for 12 months, setup waived, rate locked. Year 2 converts to the standard rate less a 15% loyalty discount, locked another 12 months. In exchange: a testimonial, a case study, and two warm intros to peer managers. That's the whole trade.

The pilot terms, honestly

Free 30 days. Auto-converts to the plan you picked unless you cancel — with a written reminder at least 7 days before, and the days-remaining count visible in the product the whole time.
Cancel anytime during the pilot — in-app or by email, immediate, no charge.
Rate lock: conversion locks your rates for 12 months; renewal increases are capped at 5%/yr with 60 days' notice. No mid-term increases, ever.
30-day out after conversion, with a pro-rata refund on prepaid annual plans.
Non-payment never locks the front desk mid-shift. That's in the Terms too.

How a pilot works

Four steps. One of them is a phone call.

Intro

A 20-minute call — or just email the founder. Bring your unit count and a guess at packages per day; that's all the discovery there is.

60-minute setup

On the desk PC you already have. Roster in, staff PINs handed out, residents get a magic link — no app-store download, no hardware, no IT project.

30 self-measuring days

Free. The log counts what happens: packages processed, notices delivered and proven, visitor decisions recorded. Your staff keep working; the record builds itself.

Board packet + your call

Export the board-ready record and the numbers. Convert at the locked rate — or cancel in one click and keep your data. Either way, no argument.

FAQ

The real objections, answered straight

Our staff are 32BJ. Is this a monitoring tool?

No — and not as a promise, as an architecture. Per-staff productivity analytics do not exist by default and the server refuses to compute them unless the building explicitly enables them — and enabling them triggers a written disclosure every staff member must acknowledge, which is itself recorded.

The log's per-event lines ("who logged this package") are the same record-keeping your paper logbook has always had — proof of notification for disputes, not productivity metrics. The pilot kit includes the posted NY §52-c staff notice and a 32BJ delegate letter template: record-keeping assistance, not new duties, not surveillance.

What happens when the internet goes down at 2 a.m.?

The desk keeps working. Package intake saves on the device first (in the browser's local storage) and syncs automatically when the connection returns — scanning never blocks on Wi-Fi. And the pilot kit includes a printable one-page manual-fallback runbook to tape under the desk for the night the whole thing is down.

You're one person. What happens to us if you disappear?

You keep running — by construction. Every account can schedule encrypted exports of all its data, encrypted with a passphrase only you hold (we store a verification hash, never the passphrase — the file is unreadable to anyone else, including us), plus a Download-now button anytime.

The same codebase runs self-hosted with no build step, and a documented restore runbook targets a working front desk on your own machine within one working day. Your data is never hostage; the continuity one-pager in the pilot kit spells it out.

We already have BuildingLink.

BuildingLink is a whole resident portal with a multi-week onboarding to match. TheDoorman does one job — the front desk, with proof — hardware-free, live in about an hour, at a fraction of the per-unit price. It can run alongside what you have; plenty of buildings keep the portal and fix the desk.

Is texting residents even legal? What about consent?

Handled, and logged. The system never texts a resident without explicit opt-in — silence is never consent — and every consent transition (opt-in, confirmation, STOP, START) lands in an append-only consent ledger with timestamp and source. STOP/HELP keywords and a suppression list are enforced automatically; non-urgent texts respect quiet hours (emergencies bypass them, by design). A step-by-step A2P 10DLC carrier-registration runbook ships with onboarding so proof-of-notification texts don't get filtered into silence.

Will the texts actually get delivered?

Honest answer: US carriers require A2P 10DLC registration before they deliver business texts, and we guide that setup as part of onboarding. Then the log doesn't say "sent" and hope — carrier delivery receipts flow back in, so the record reads "delivered 9:04 p.m." Residents always have their in-app inbox and email as additional channels.

What does it cost after the pilot and the first year?

The rate you convert at is locked for 12 months, and any renewal increase is capped at 5% per year with 60 days' written notice — no mid-term increases, ever. Founding partners pay $1.25/unit in Year 1 and standard-less-15% in Year 2, locked. The full schedule is published above; there are no per-message fees on top.

Is this a life-safety system?

No, and we say so in the Terms. Broadcasts assist your staff in notifying residents; they depend on carriers, networks, and residents' own devices. TheDoorman is not a substitute for fire alarms, mandated building systems, or 911 — it's the record of what your desk did, which is exactly what it claims to be.

Bring your unit count. Leave with the business case.

The calculator prices your building on the committed schedule and generates a one-page, board-ready proposal — formulas shown, pilot terms included.

Build the business case Free board report from your own log Email the founder