New Direction: Compliance Training Tracker
After walking away from the PDF converter, we did broader market research to find something worth building. We looked at Jira/Sheets integrations, document automation, e-signatures, and a range of vertical niches. The research kept pointing at the same structural pattern: expensive enterprise tools on one end, spreadsheet hacks on the other, nothing useful in the middle.
The clearest example of this pattern we found: compliance training tracking.
The gap
Most companies — particularly those in regulated industries, government contracting, healthcare, construction, and anywhere with mandatory annual training requirements — face the same problem. Employees need to complete a defined set of trainings on a recurring schedule. Certificates need to be stored. Due dates need to be tracked. Someone needs to know, at a glance, who's current and who isn't.
The market for this splits cleanly into two tiers that don't serve small teams well.
The high end: full LMS platforms. Trainual runs $279/month for 26–50 people. TalentLMS, Absorb, Docebo — similar range. These tools are built around hosting course content: creating quizzes, building learning paths, tracking video completion. If your employees are taking external courses — government portals, third-party CBT sites, industry certification platforms — you don't need any of that. You need to track that someone completed a thing, when, and where the certificate is. A full LMS is a significant overkill and a significant expense for this use case.
The low end: spreadsheets. Functional. Free. No reminders. No certificate storage. Status visibility requires someone to manually maintain it. When a training link changes or a new version is released, someone has to know and update it. This works until it doesn't.
We searched for open source alternatives. Moodle and Open edX are the canonical answers — both are massive platforms designed for course delivery, both require a technical team to operate. There is no lightweight, focused, self-hosted compliance tracker. There's nothing between "run your own Moodle instance" and "pay $279/month for a platform built for a different use case."
What we're building
A simple, focused tool that does exactly this and nothing else:
- Define required trainings: name, link to the actual training portal, instructions for the login flow or version specifics, recurrence (annual, biennial, etc.)
- Maintain a roster
- Record completions: date and certificate
- Show a dashboard: current / due soon / overdue, per person and per training
- Send reminders automatically as due dates approach
No course hosting. No quiz builder. No learning paths. Just tracking, certificates, and reminders — for teams that complete their training elsewhere.
It will not try to be a Trainual replacement. Trainual is for onboarding and SOP documentation; that's a different product. This is for the specific recurring compliance burden that exists alongside whatever else an LMS might do.
Stack and distribution
Standalone web app, not a Google Workspace add-on. A supervisor needs a dashboard, not a spreadsheet sidebar. Sign in with Google to reduce setup friction. Certificate storage via Google Drive or direct upload. Email reminders. We're already on Cloudflare Pages; the backend will run on Cloudflare Workers with D1 for storage.
Pricing target: $30–40/month for teams up to 50. That's roughly 10–15% of Trainual for a tool scoped to what these teams actually need.
What could go wrong
Selling to small teams in regulated industries requires reaching them, which is harder than ranking in the Google Workspace Marketplace. We don't have a built-in distribution channel the way the PDF converter would have. Acquiring the first 10 paying customers is the real first challenge — building the product is the easier part.
We're also making an assumption about willingness to pay. The spreadsheet is free and people tolerate it. The question is whether the friction is painful enough to spend $30–40/month to remove. We'll find out.