Guardian Intelligence
Not a scheduling tool with a few extras. A full intelligence platform — competitive analysis, next-best actions, campaign production, discovery placement, and the operating systems that turn that intelligence into bookings.
How it's built
01 — Intelligence
Signals, rivals, stats, creative history. Merba watches your market and accumulates a growing picture of where you sit and what to do next.
02 — Production
From the intelligence layer, Merba builds campaign briefs and produces broadcast-quality video ads and Instagram Reels — without templates.
03 — Operations
The full business infrastructure the intelligence runs on top of. Calendar, booking, clients, invoices, loyalty, staff, payments.
The architecture
Most platforms manage your schedule. Merba watches what your competitors are charging, which of your services are underpriced, and which clients haven't been back in 60 days. Then it tells you what to do about it.
Merba was designed by an MBA and software engineer with a background in market analysis. Not a technology hypothesis — a business one. Independent service providers have no competitive intelligence function. No one is watching their pricing position, their demand patterns, or their client churn. Merba is that function, built for businesses that never had access to it.
The intelligence runs continuously — no setup required once it's active. Your schedule, services, and pricing sit inside a live view of your market. When conditions shift, the next move is already ready.
Merba scans what competing businesses in your category charge, how they position themselves, and where you sit relative to the local market — updated continuously, not estimated once.
Which services are growing. Which clients are slipping away. Which slow hours could fill at a discount. The signal is already in your bookings — Merba reads it.
When Merba identifies an angle — an underserved segment, a pricing gap, a competitor weakness — it builds the ad brief, design direction, and video from that context. Not from a template.
The intelligence starts working as soon as you list. No spreadsheet, no weekly export, no manual analysis. It runs in the background and surfaces what matters.
Campaigns
Before a single frame renders, the system has already analyzed pricing pressure, seasonal demand patterns, and the positioning that moves clients in your market segment. That analysis is the brief.
The output is broadcast-quality video — professional motion graphics, licensed music, a full production pipeline. But the real advantage is upstream. The analysis that runs before any creative decision is made.
The gap between an independent provider and a franchise is not talent. It is access to marketing infrastructure. Merba closes that gap — then connects that same intelligence back into discovery, pricing, retention, and day-to-day operations.
What the intelligence does
What it does not
From analysis to action
Intelligence alone is not enough. Knowing that Tuesdays are slow, that a service is priced below market, or that 30 clients haven't been back in two months — that knowledge has to become action.
The Growth Command Center translates signals into concrete business moves. Pricing adjustments. Slow-hour demand generation. Lapsed client recovery. Campaign launches. Each recommendation is ranked by impact, evidence-backed, and connected to a single action that executes the move inside Merba.
Outcomes feed back into the system. After 14 days, Merba reports what changed — bookings influenced, clients recovered, revenue observed. Not a claim of causation. A record of what happened next.
The point of the intelligence is not observation. It is action.
Discovery and distribution
Campaigns drive awareness. The discovery map converts it. Customers find you, see your live availability, and can build a full day across multiple independent providers in one checkout. Merba brings you clients who were not looking for you — yet.
A production-quality video built from your market intelligence. The angle calibrated to your competitive position, the message shaped by buyer psychology in your segment.
A real map of independent providers. Category filters, live availability, and Merba Specials — discounted slow-hour slots that get cheaper as the time approaches.
Hair at 10. Nails at 12. Massage at 2. Chain booking lets customers plan a full day across independent businesses — each separately managed, paid in a single checkout.
No back-and-forth. No unprotected no-shows. The booking lands in your calendar with a deposit already collected.
Live map of Merba businesses, filterable by category and location. Real availability — not stale profiles. No marketplace algorithm deciding whether you get seen.
Cross-business itinerary booking. Each provider gets a confirmed appointment and deposit. Clients you would never have reached alone.
Discount blocks that ramp as the slot approaches. Slow hours become discovery opportunities. Calendar fills without you touching it.
Operations
Intelligence drives discovery. Discovery drives bookings. Bookings need a system that runs them without friction — scheduling, payments, client records, staff coordination. All of it is here, built for independent operators who need real depth without the overhead. The point is not to add more software. The point is to make the intelligence operational.
$0
Free Taste the system
$24.99
Sole Proprietor per month
$74.99
Team up to 10, per month
No commissions. No booking fees charged to providers.
Independent service providers have no marketing department. No one running competitive analysis, evaluating seasonal demand, or building strategy for the next campaign. They get scheduling software — and they are left to figure out growth on their own.
Merba was designed to close that gap. Not by adding more features to a calendar. By building the intelligence layer first — proprietary architecture, dynamic taxonomies, a system that compounds with every business it learns from. Built by someone who ran the numbers on why independent service businesses fail. Not a technology hypothesis. A business one.
98.1%
of Canadian businesses are small businesses
59.2%
employ 1–4 people
23.9%
20-year survival rate for service businesses
ISED 2025
The economic model
Every booking platform in this market takes a percentage of every appointment. That is structurally misaligned with your success. Their growth depends on your revenue.
Merba charges $24.99 or $74.99 per month. No commissions. No percentage of payments. No markup on bookings. The economics are yours.
Each paid subscription includes monthly intelligence credits — spend them on AI video ads, Reels, or Advisor sessions. Need more? Top up without upgrading your plan.
How it's built
The intelligence design — how Merba studies your market, classifies your business, finds competitive gaps, and builds campaign strategy — is proprietary. That architecture is Merba's, built from the ground up for service businesses.
The foundational AI models that execute this work are Claude (Anthropic), ChatGPT and Codex (OpenAI). These are the engines. They do not define the strategy or the intelligence approach — Merba's platform design does. The models are the computation layer.
Runway provides the real-time video interface for the Guardian Intelligence Advisor — the live avatar you speak with. Runway handles video delivery and voice rendering. It is not the intelligence. The reasoning, the market context, the business knowledge your Advisor brings to every session — that comes from Merba's intelligence layer, not from Runway.
Free to start. No credit card. Intelligence included from day one.