# About Kardow | Founded by Simon Gingras of Emplo.ca > Kardow began as the software behind Emplo.ca, a 22,000-member job board in Canada’s capital region. The story, who it is for, and how we charge. ### In short Kardow is job board software for publishers and newsletters. Our customers, from national news sites to local newsletters and trade media, use it to run their own jobs sections, under their own brand and on their own domain. We are not a job board ourselves, and we do not compete with the boards our customers build. #### I built a job board for my city In 2022 I co-founded [Emplo.ca](https://emplo.ca), a job board for my hometown of Gatineau. If that doesn't ring a bell, it's the city right across the river from Ottawa, in Canada's capital region. Close enough to see Parliament, far enough that most people have never heard of it. It started as a simple site to help local people find local work. I didn't expect much. Then the community showed up. Our groups now have more than 22,000 members, and Emplo has become one of the places people in the region go to find a job, and employers go to hire. I still remember the first time an employer paid to post a job. The Stripe notification came in and I just stared at it. Someone I'd never met had paid for something we built. That was the first time I'd made money online, and it's a feeling I haven't forgotten. We first ran Emplo on an existing platform. It was fine, right up until I wanted to automate something. No API. So, like any reasonable person, I built my own job board software instead. That became Kardow. Other people with an audience soon wanted the same thing: news publishers, newsletter writers, niche communities. Today Kardow runs job boards like Telegrafi Jobs, from one of the most visited news portals in Kosovo; Waco Buzz, a local newsletter read by more than 15,000 people in Waco, Texas; and [PeopleOps Jobs](https://peopleopsjobs.io), built for a community of more than 100,000 HR and recruiting professionals. Gatineau to Kosovo to Texas is not a route I would have predicted. #### Built for how people search now Job seekers don't only google anymore. They ask ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google's AI Overviews. Kardow boards are built to be found there too. Every page is readable by AI search engines, every job carries clean [structured data for Google for Jobs](/articles/job-posting-structured-data-guide), and boards are fast. In our [speed test of 13 platforms](/job-board-software-speed-test), Kardow was among the fastest on both mobile and desktop. Yes, we tested ourselves too, and we published the numbers. It's the thing customers bring up most. They're surprised to find their board in AI answers, not just on Google. Emplo still runs on Kardow. Every feature gets used on a real board, with real employers, before it reaches yours. If something breaks, I'm usually the first to know. **Simon Gingras**, founder of Kardow #### What we build Kardow turns a description of a job board into a working one. You start from a designer-built template, then change anything by describing it to the AI editor or by editing the code directly. The important part is what sits underneath: every board is a real application rather than a theme on a shared platform, so its design, its fields and its flows can be changed without waiting for us to add a setting for it. A board ships with the parts that are tedious to build and easy to get wrong: payments, employer and candidate accounts, applications with resume upload, scheduled job imports from careers sites and feeds, Google for Jobs structured data and sitemaps, analytics, a custom domain with SSL, and a REST API with webhooks and a hosted MCP connector for AI assistants. #### Who it is for The people who get the most out of Kardow are the ones running a board as a business or as part of one: niche and industry boards, boards attached to a community, association, newsletter or media brand, recruitment agencies publishing their own listings, and companies whose careers site has outgrown a page on the marketing website. It is not built for people looking for a job. We sell the software; the boards belong to our customers, along with the listings and the audience on them. #### How we charge Plans start at $79 a month, with Pro at $179 and Scale at $379, billed monthly. Paid a year in advance, the same plans work out to $59, $134 and $284 a month. There are no setup fees, and the trial runs 14 days. We take 0% of what a board earns, on every plan. If a customer charges employers for job posts, sells bundles or subscriptions, or puts candidate data behind a paywall, that money goes directly to them through their own Stripe account. Our incentive is to keep a board worth paying for every month, not to take a cut of its success. #### What we deliberately do not do We do not sell domains and we do not supply traffic. A board owner connects a domain they already own, and we ship the markup, sitemaps and landing pages that let search engines index the board. Any claim that Kardow brings an audience with it would be false. We also do not lock the work in. On Pro and Scale the owner can download the code behind their board and edit it locally with the Kardow CLI. A board built here is a real codebase, and it stays that way. #### Talk to us Support and sales both reach us at [support@kardow.com](mailto:support@kardow.com). To talk through a migration, an Enterprise setup or a board you are not sure is possible, book a call on the [contact page](/contact). Developers and AI agents can start from the [documentation](/docs), the [OpenAPI spec](/openapi.json) or the [MCP connector](/mcp).