Our biggest competitors are Excel and PDF
The hardest thing to displace in a carbon project isn't a rival platform. It's the spreadsheet.
4 June 2026 · 5 min read
When we ask a project developer what they use to run their MRV today, the honest answer is almost never a competitor's product. It's Excel. And email. And a shared drive full of PDFs.
That isn't a joke at the industry's expense. It's the single biggest thing standing between today's carbon projects and the credible, checkable evidence the market now demands. Our real competition isn't other software. It's the spreadsheet and the PDF.
The competitor nobody names
Ask what a project runs on and you'll hear the same stack everywhere: a folder of spreadsheets for activities and measurements, a pile of PDFs for reports and permits, email for everything else, and one person who knows where it all lives. It's free, it's familiar, and it works — right up until someone needs to prove that the numbers are real.
We take this seriously, because it tells us what we are actually competing against. Not a feature list. A habit. And habits are displaced only by being clearly, obviously better at the thing that matters.
Why the spreadsheet feels free and costs everything
A spreadsheet will accept anything. That flexibility is exactly the problem. There is no structure that ties a figure to where it came from, when it was recorded, or who recorded it — so the chain of custody that verification depends on simply does not exist. The number sits in a cell, detached from its own evidence.
And spreadsheets multiply. Data is re-keyed from a field app into one sheet, copied into another, mailed around, and edited in parallel until nobody can say which version is true. Every one of those hops is a place for an error to enter and never be caught. The cost of a spreadsheet is not the licence. It is the integrity you quietly lose to it.
The PDF problem: evidence you can't ask a question
A PDD or a monitoring report as a PDF is a tombstone for data. The work was real; the evidence was once structured; and then it was flattened into a document that a human has to read, and that a machine cannot query. You cannot ask a PDF which plots its biomass figure came from, or whether a satellite pass agrees with a field record. An auditor re-extracts it all by hand — slowly, expensively, and with no link back to the source.
This is why "we have a report" and "we can prove it" are not the same sentence. A report is a claim. Checkable evidence is a record you can interrogate.
From documents to a record
The alternative is not a slicker spreadsheet or a prettier PDF. It is a different object altogether: a system of record where every value keeps its source, location, time and author attached to it, from the moment it is captured. The document still gets produced at the end — but it is generated from organised, traceable evidence rather than reconstructed from memory.
That's the line we're trying to cross with every project: not 'replace your spreadsheet with ours,' but 'stop trusting documents and start keeping a record.' It's a harder sell than a feature. It's also the only thing that actually closes the gap.
See what a real system of record looks like — one place where field data, satellite analysis and registry packages keep their full chain of custody.
Next in the series: why the cost of proof is quietly an equity problem — and what changes when a 50-hectare project becomes viable.