Build site-specific RAMS and COSHH packs for UK tradespeople
Photo to compliant safety docs in two minutes, flat £19 a month
Executive Summary
In a nutshell
A mobile-first AI builder that turns a photo of a job site into a site-specific Risk Assessment, Method Statement, COSHH assessment, and toolbox talk in under two minutes. Targets the 1.5 million UK sole traders and micro-firms in plumbing, electrics, building, decorating, and scaffolding who increasingly need RAMS to win commercial and public-sector work. Flat-rate £19/month covers the whole business, not per-user. Incumbents charge per seat (HandsHQ £44 to £275/mo, RAMS Pro £15/seat) or per document (RAMS App £15/doc) and were built for desktop. HandsHQ was acquired by Health & Safety Institute in August 2025, pulling it upmarket. The Building Safety Act 2022 regime kicked in fully in 2024 to 2026, and Principal Contractors are now legally required to verify subcontractor competence with site-specific RAMS before work commences. AI-first RAMS is genuinely new ground (RAMS AI launched 2025, VioTrade added AI on Business Pro only) and no incumbent has the mobile-first, flat-rate, offline-capable combination that suits a sole trader sat in a van.
The Story
Meet the user
Dan runs a two-man electrical firm in Reading. He pulled in a £14k commercial fit-out last week for a small office refit, then the Principal Contractor emailed asking for a site-specific RAMS and a COSHH assessment for the silicone sealant before he could so much as park the van. He spent the whole of Sunday evening hunched over the kitchen table with a Word template he downloaded from the ECA, copy-pasting from a job he did two years ago in Bracknell, swapping out the address, hoping the PC's H&S officer wouldn't notice that the methodology still mentioned scaffolding (there isn't any). His wife asks why he is doing paperwork at 11pm again.
He pays £15 per document at RAMS App when he is feeling flush, but that adds up fast on the months he wins three or four commercial jobs. Then he hears about SitePack on the WhatsApp group his sparky mates run, downloads the app, snaps a photo of the riser cupboard he is about to work in, taps three trade-specific tickboxes, and a proper site-specific RAMS lands as a branded PDF in his Mail app two minutes later. He flicks it to the PC before bed.
Scores
How does this idea stack up?
7.7/10
Roughly 7,000 monthly UK searches across rams app, rams template, method statement template, coshh assessment template and adjacent terms. Sub-market of ~1.5M UK sole-trader and micro-firm trades, every one of whom needs RAMS to touch commercial work. HandsHQ's HSI acquisition leaves the small end visibly underserved.
Per-seat pricing punishes growing teams, £15-per-document pricing punishes high-volume tradies, and a recurring forum complaint is spending hours hunched over a Word template at the weekend. PCs now reject thin or copy-pasted RAMS under BSA competence rules, raising the stakes.
LLM plus structured trade templates is well-trodden ground. Offline-first PWA on phone is standard. No regulated data, no licensing required. Stripe, Supabase, Anthropic API, that's the lot. RAMS AI has already proven the AI angle technically works.
Building Safety Act 2022 fully in force 2024 to 2026, raising the documentation bar across the board. Edinburgh Reporter (April 2026) headline: Safety Documentation Standards Are Rising Across UK Construction, and many firms are not ready. HandsHQ's August 2025 acquisition by Health & Safety Institute creates an incumbent-distraction window. AI-first RAMS is brand new ground.
RAMS obligations are permanent. Health and Safety at Work Act 1974, Management of H&S at Work Regs 1999, CDM 2015, BSA 2022 all stack. The documentation requirement is not going away, and AI replaces the template-editing toil, not the regulatory need. Recurring SaaS fit.
Solo-buildable in 4 to 6 weeks. Standard web stack, no specialist data, offline-first PWA is well-understood. The harder bit is trade-channel distribution: federation partnerships, trade-magazine deals, getting into the WhatsApp groups. Build is easy, marketing is the grind.
Strongest
Timing
The Building Safety Act regime is forcing Principal Contractors to start rejecting sole-trader RAMS that look generic or copy-pasted, and HandsHQ's HSI acquisition has pulled the obvious incumbent upmarket at exactly the moment the small-end demand is rising.
Watch out
Feasibility (accuracy)
The category has a 2025 entrant (RAMS AI) and a Reddit-grade DIY recipe doing the rounds (paperlessconstruction's RAMS with ChatGPT). If your generated docs read like ChatGPT slop the PCs will spot it and your reputation tanks. Trade-specific template scaffolding is the moat, not the LLM call.
Pain Point
The problem
“Companies often have their own standard formats for RAMS, and it's not difficult to create your own in Word or Excel, but professionals previously spent hours on RAMS documents and can now create a professional, compliant RAMS in under 10 minutes using specialised tools.”
— paraphrased from electriciansforums.net and paperlessconstruction.co.uk
The UK trade landscape is being squeezed from two directions at once. From above, Principal Contractors under the Building Safety Act 2022 are now legally required to verify subcontractor competence before work commences, and the bar for what counts as a compliant RAMS has visibly risen. Generic, copy-pasted, or AI-slop documents are being bounced back. From below, the existing software market is built for medium-sized firms with a dedicated SHEQ person, not for the two-person electrical firm or the sole-trader plumber working out of a van.
Per-seat pricing punishes growing teams: HandsHQ starts at £44/mo for a single user with one RAMS template and scales to £275/mo and up. Even RAMS Pro at £15/seat/month becomes painful at 50 people. Per-document pricing punishes high-volume tradies: RAMS App offers £15 per document for occasional users, which adds up rapidly when a busy electrical contractor is bidding on three or four commercial jobs a month.
Setup is brutal. Existing tools take weeks to onboard and end up as shelfware after 6 months. The trade buyer wants something that works on the phone in the van by the end of today. No real offline mode exists; most incumbents are web apps, so the bloke in a basement plant room with no signal is stuck. Documents look generic, PCs under BSA push back on template-and-search-replace jobs, and sole traders are an afterthought in a UX that assumes there is an admin person at a desk.
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