Every business runs on information: who your customers are, what they’ve asked for, what you’ve promised them, and where each piece of work stands. Most of that information starts out in the tools that happen to be nearby — a spreadsheet here, a shared inbox there, a form builder for the website, a CRM somebody signed up for three years ago.
Each of those tools comes with its own idea of what your business looks like. The spreadsheet thinks in rows and columns. The CRM thinks in leads, contacts and deals. The form builder thinks in one-off forms that don’t know about each other. You end up translating between them, retyping the same details, and hoping nothing drifts out of sync.
Stratosphere Atlas starts from a different premise: describe the information your business actually collects, and let Atlas reuse that description everywhere you need it.
The idea in one sentence
Atlas is a platform for structuring your business data. Instead of bending your business to fit someone else’s model, you define the pieces — the fields that belong together, the records you keep, the kinds of things you track — and Atlas turns them into forms, records, documents and APIs that all agree with each other.
Three ideas carry the whole platform
You don’t need to learn a large vocabulary to get value from Atlas. Three ideas do most of the work.
Data schemas. A data schema is a set of fields that belong together, like Contact Details (full name, email address, phone number) or Service Address (street, city, state, postal code). Each field has a type and rules, such as whether it’s required or must be a valid email address. You define a data schema once.
Record schemas. A record schema is a collection of data schemas. A Service Request might combine Contact Details, a Service Address and a description of the work. Because any data schema can be added to any record schema, the address you defined once shows up — identically — in every form that needs an address.
Classifications. On the Enterprise tier, a classification describes a kind of thing your business keeps track of: customers, properties, equipment, crews. Classifications can be nested, and each one holds the individual customers or properties within it, along with their records. Together they form a connected network of data that mirrors how your business actually works.
Read more in What is a data schema?, What is a record schema? and What is a classification?.
Why “define once, reuse everywhere” matters
The value of Atlas compounds as you use it. The first form you build takes a few minutes. The second one is faster, because Contact Details and Service Address already exist. By the tenth, most of your forms are assembled from pieces you already trust.
That reuse also protects you. When you improve a schema, Atlas creates a new version instead of changing the old one, so forms you’ve already printed and data you’ve already collected keep their original shape. Nothing you collected last month is silently rewritten by a change you make today. (More on that in How schema versioning protects the data you’ve already collected.)
Start where you are
Atlas has three subscription tiers, and each includes everything in the one before it:
| Tier | Price | What it adds |
|---|---|---|
| Basic | Free | Data schemas, record schemas and printable forms |
| Advanced | $5 / month | Online submissions through public form links |
| Enterprise | $99 / month | Your own classifications, security policies, and Atlas as a backend for your applications |
That structure is deliberate. A business that still runs on clipboards can start on Basic and print consistent forms today. When customers want to fill forms in online, Advanced adds a public link to every form you’ve already built — nothing has to be rebuilt. And when you’re ready to organize the whole business, not just its forms, Enterprise adds classifications, security policies and full API access.
What Atlas is not
It’s worth being clear about what Atlas doesn’t ask of you:
- It doesn’t ask you to adopt someone else’s vocabulary. If your business tracks properties and crews, those are the names you use.
- It doesn’t ask you to code. Schemas, forms and classifications are defined through the Atlas interface.
- It doesn’t ask you to start over as you grow. You add classifications and schemas; you don’t migrate to a different product.
A day in the life, before and after
Consider how a single service request moves through a small business without a shared model.
Before. A customer fills in a contact form on the website. The message lands in a shared inbox. Someone copies the name and address into a spreadsheet, spelling the street slightly differently than last time. A crew lead prints a paper job sheet from a word-processor template that asks for the address in yet another format. After the visit, notes come back on paper and are typed into a second spreadsheet. When the customer calls a month later, nobody can see the whole history in one place.
After. The same request arrives through an Atlas form built from Contact Details and Service Address. It lands in Data Collection already structured — street in the street field, a validated email in the email field. The printed version of the form, used at the front desk, asks exactly the same questions. On Enterprise, the request connects to the customer’s property, and the property connects to its service history. When the customer calls back, the history is where you’d expect it.
Nothing about the work changed. What changed is that the information was described once, and everything else read from that description.
Who Atlas is for
Atlas fits a wide range of organizations, but it’s especially strong for:
- Service businesses that track customers, locations and jobs — landscaping, cleaning, maintenance, inspections.
- Operations teams that run intake, requests or applications through forms and need the answers to arrive consistently.
- Growing businesses that have outgrown spreadsheets but find off-the-shelf CRMs don’t match what they actually track.
- Teams with developers who want to build their own portals, dashboards or mobile apps on one well-governed data model.
It’s less of a fit if all you need is a single one-off survey, or if a sales pipeline of leads and deals is genuinely the whole of your business.
Common questions
Do I need technical skills to use Atlas? No. Data schemas, forms and classifications are built in the Atlas interface. Developer tools — the Atlas API Client and Atlas SDK — are there for teams that want to build their own applications on Enterprise, but they aren’t required.
Can I start without committing to a paid plan? Yes. Basic is free and includes data schemas, record schemas and printable forms.
Will I have to rebuild things when I upgrade? No. Each tier includes everything in the one before it. The form you build on Basic gets a public link on Advanced without changes, and the data schemas you define on Basic are the same ones Enterprise record schemas are built from.
What happens to old data when I change a form? Publishing a change to a schema creates a new version. Data you’ve already collected keeps the shape it was collected with.
Can I control who sees what? On Enterprise, every classification has a security policy, and policies grant specific levels of access — Discover, Read, Write, Archive and Manage — to roles, user groups or individual users.
Where to go next
If you’re evaluating Atlas, the fastest way to understand it is to watch it work. The Atlas video series walks through each tier from start to finish, and Getting to know Atlas summarizes what every tier unlocks. If you’d rather build, start with Build your first form in Atlas — it takes about ten minutes on the free Basic tier.
