TerpLedger

Idea

The freelancer-side operating hub for interpreters and translators who work across many language agencies at once. TerpLedger pulls assignment confirmations from any agency into one calendar, flags scheduling conflicts before they turn into missed jobs, turns every accepted assignment into a tracked invoice with per-agency payment aging, and shows a reliability score for each agency before the freelancer accepts the next offer.

Market gap

Every interpretation management system on the market today, Boostlingo IMS, Caretap, Interpreter.io, is built and sold to the language service agencies and hospitals that dispatch interpreters, not to the freelancers who actually work the jobs. Boostlingo's own IMS pages describe the buyer as an LSP, a hospital or health system, or an enterprise, never the individual contractor.

On the freelancer's side of the exact same relationship, the only tools that exist are decades-old, community-run agency reputation lists: Payment Practices and the ProZ Blue Board. Both tell a freelancer whether an agency has a history of paying late or not at all, but neither connects that history to the freelancer's actual calendar or actual outstanding invoices. Freelancers still track their own schedule and receivables in spreadsheets, personal calendars, or memory, while working several agencies at once because that is the normal way the freelance side of the industry operates (BLS reports 27 percent of interpreters and translators are self-employed).

Timing: remote interpretation demand (OPI and VRI) has kept growing since the pandemic, which means freelancers are signed onto more agency portals than ever, each with its own scheduling system and payment terms, and the underlying non-payment problem is not shrinking. The American Translators Association still runs a standing conference session, "Ensuring Payment Before, During, and After the Project," and maintains a resource page pointing freelancers to Payment Practices and the Blue Board because the problem remains active enough to need it.

Total Addressable Market (TAM)

Bottom-up, US self-employed base:

• BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook (2024 data): interpreters and translators held about 75,300 jobs in the US; 27 percent are self-employed. That is roughly 20,331 self-employed interpreters and translators in the US. Source: bls.gov/ooh, Interpreters and Translators.
• At a $19/month Solo tier ($228/year): US SAM = 20,331 x $228 is approximately $4.6M/year.
• SOM at an 8 percent penetration ceiling in years 1 to 2, a normal ceiling for a niche prosumer SaaS reached through word of mouth in a small professional community: 20,331 x 8% x $228 is approximately $371,000/year.

Global upside (directional, not counted in SAM/SOM above): Payment Practices tracks 11,749 outsourcers and the ProZ Blue Board tracks 21,432 outsourcers, per the American Translators Association's own citation of both databases. Those outsourcer counts are global, not US-only, and imply a global base of actively-vetting freelance translators and interpreters several times the US self-employed figure. Assuming conservatively 4x the US self-employed base globally (a directional assumption, not sourced to a hard count), global TAM at the same $228/year ACV is roughly $18.5M/year.

Monetization strategy

Monthly subscription billed directly to the individual freelancer (prosumer B2B). A free tier hooks freelancers into the calendar and conflict detection; paid tiers unlock unlimited agencies, invoice aging with automatic follow-up reminders, and reliability score lookups. Freelancers keep paying because the app is where their actual outstanding money lives (unpaid invoices tracked per agency), and because the reliability score gets more valuable as more freelancers contribute their own agency payment experience, the same network effect that has kept Payment Practices and the Blue Board running for over two decades.

Pricing strategy

• Free: one agency, manual calendar entry, no reliability score lookups. Entry point.
• Solo, $19/month: unlimited agencies, email-forward assignment ingestion, automatic conflict detection, invoice aging and payment reminders.
• Pro, $39/month (anchor): everything in Solo, plus unlimited agency reliability score lookups, a contribute-and-unlock model for the score database, and a quarterly income export built for estimated-tax filing.

Anchor logic: the median interpreter/translator hourly wage is $28.58 (BLS, May 2024). One missed conflict, or one job taken with a chronically late-paying agency, costs more than a year of Pro. Pricing is framed against that single mistake, not against generic SaaS comparables.

Lead magnet

A free, no-signup "Agency Payment Reliability Lookup": type an agency name and see any known public payment-reliability flags for it, seeded from TerpLedger's own crowdsourced submissions plus a prompt inviting the freelancer to add their own experience. It proves the core promise (check before you accept) in one search, with zero signup friction, and every submission grows the score database that the paid tier sells access to.

Social proof that the problem exists

• Payment Practices (paymentpractices.net): a payment-reliability database for translation and interpreting agencies that has run continuously since 1999 and, per the American Translators Association's own citation, tracks 11,749 outsourcers. A single-purpose database surviving over 25 years shows the underlying non-payment problem is real and ongoing, not anecdotal. https://www.atanet.org/resources/resources-to-help-ensure-translation-payment/
• ProZ Blue Board: "an important risk management tool for language service providers since 2001," used by freelancers to check an outsourcer's payment history before accepting work, with non-payment records serious enough that "an outsourcer's job posting and messaging rights can be revoked due to non-payment issues on their Blue Board record." Per ATA's citation it currently tracks 21,432 outsourcers. https://go.proz.com/blog/solve-non-payments-faster
• American Translators Association resource page: the main US professional body for this field maintains a standing resource page pointing members to payment-tracking tools and runs a dedicated conference session, "Ensuring Payment Before, During, and After the Project," because members keep needing it. https://www.atanet.org/resources/resources-to-help-ensure-translation-payment/

Competitors

• Boostlingo IMS: interpretation scheduling, billing, and rate management sold to language service providers, hospitals and health systems, and enterprise buyers, not to the individual freelancer.
• Caretap: interpreter scheduling and management software built for agencies to manage their own interpreter rosters.
• Interpreter.io: agency-side scheduling platform addressing agency operational challenges like cancellations and demand spikes, not freelancer-side income tracking.
• Payment Practices and ProZ Blue Board: real and heavily used, but they are static lookup databases only. Neither connects to a freelancer's calendar, generates conflict warnings, or tracks the freelancer's own invoices and payment aging.
• Generic freelance invoicing tools (Bonsai, HoneyBook): handle invoicing for any freelancer but have no concept of a "language service agency," no assignment-conflict detection, and no agency reliability data.

What competitors offer now

Agency-side platforms (Boostlingo, Caretap, Interpreter.io) give the agency one dashboard to schedule its own roster of interpreters, bill its own clients, and run utilization reports. None of them, by design, gives an individual freelancer who works for five different agencies a combined view of their own schedule or their own receivables across all five. Payment Practices and the Blue Board give a freelancer a lookup before accepting a new agency, current, ratings-based, useful, but static: no calendar, no invoice tracking, no automatic conflict flag when two agencies both confirm a Tuesday 10am slot.

What can be done differently to attract customers

Sit on the freelancer's side of the relationship that every existing tool ignores. Ingest assignment confirmations the way freelancers already receive them, forwarded emails or a connected inbox, so there is no new portal for agencies to adopt and no cooperation required from any agency. Turn the two things freelancers already do by hand (chase down which jobs overlap, and remember which agencies pay slowly) into automatic, always-on features, then make the reliability score a two-sided flywheel: the more freelancers who log a payment outcome, the better the score gets for everyone, the same mechanic that has kept Payment Practices and the Blue Board alive for decades, but tied directly to the freelancer's own calendar and invoices instead of a separate lookup site.