The monthly figure is not the whole bill

Five lines that are not the plan fee

A rate card answers one question: what the software costs to have. It does not answer what it costs to run, and the difference is not small change. Money leaves through five other doors — the cut taken on every card payment, the charge for one more person on the app, what happens when you run more work than your tier allows, the parts sold beside the plan, and whatever it takes to get you live.

We went through all six products looking for a figure on each of those five. Here is how far we got.

Our analysis — Counted from what each vendor publishes on its own pages.

Read the bottom row first. Every one of these products has to be set up, loaded with your customer list and taught to your crew. 3 of the 6 describe that work somewhere on their own pages. Not one of them says what it costs.

The cut on every card payment

This is the line that moves the most money and the one buyers check last. It is charged on what your customers pay you, not on what you pay the vendor, so it grows with the business while the subscription sits still.

One more person on the app

Hiring is the cost line you can actually see coming, and it is the one a rate card is least likely to answer in full. 3 of the 6 attach a figure to another login, and not one of those 3 does it on every tier it lists.

Official — Published by the vendor.

ServiceM8's zero is a real answer, not a missing one: its paid tiers say users are unlimited, and it charges for work rather than for people. The other two figures come with a boundary attached. Housecall Pro prices a seat on its largest tier and, below that, says only that extra users are available there — so what a sixth person costs a shop on a middle tier is not something you can read. Jobber publishes one seat charge across its rate card, and on the two tiers sold as fixed bundles of logins we could not establish whether that same charge applies.

Which of these shapes is cheaper for your crew is a different question, and it has its own guide: per seat or per job, worked through with two shops.

Running more work than your tier allows

Only one of the six sells by how much work you do, so only one of them can charge you for doing more of it. ServiceM8's tiers each come with a job allowance, and its largest tier publishes what an extra job costs past that allowance.

Our analysis — Our judgement, based on the research below.

The published charge for going over is 20¢ a job. Put it against that last column and something odd falls out: an extra job past the cap is charged at less than a job works out at inside any of the allowances, including the tier the charge is published for. Before you read anything into that, note that this charge is published for one tier only — we could not establish what the smaller tiers do at the cap, and the difference between billing overage and refusing to open the job is the whole question. Do not plan around it.

The same vendor bills text messages at 10¢ each on its free tier and states that texts are included on the paid ones, while the same page also refers to charges for going over on texts. The two statements sit side by side and we could not work out where the line falls, so we are not going to guess at it for you.

Nobody else in the set sells by volume, and no other vendor publishes an allowance you could exceed. That is not the same as a promise that you can run as much work as you like — none of them says so, and we have left it open rather than fill it in.

The parts sold beside the plan

Every one of the six sells something that is not in the tier you signed for. The question is whether you can find out what it costs before the call.

Official — Published by the vendor.

2 of the 6 attach figures to what they sell separately. 3 name their extras and put a figure on none of them, so you can see the shape of that part of the bill without seeing its size. For ServiceTitan we do not hold the list at all, and that one is our gap rather than theirs.

Our analysis — Our judgement, based on the research below.

Take all 3 and you are paying $177/mo beside a tier that starts at $49/mo. Nobody has to take them, and that is the point: the tier figure you compared was never the figure you would have ended up on. We would rather a vendor publish these and let you add them up than leave you to find out on a renewal.

ServiceM8 publishes one add-on figure and it is another floor: from $19 /mo ·flat rate — a stated lower bound, not a price anyone is quoted. "From $19/month" is a stated lower bound, not a price. Includes a 1-month free trial. for its phone system. “From” is the second time on this page that a starting figure stands in for a rate, and it has the same problem — you cannot build a monthly total out of a lower bound.

Housecall Pro names three paid extras and prices none of them. One of the three is described as a value bundled into its largest tier rather than as something with a list price, which is a marketing figure, not a rate, so we have not carried it across as one. Workiz and FieldEdge each name their add-ons and tell you to call. In Workiz's case that includes the phone and answering tools that are the main reason most shops look at it — so the quote for the tier is not a quote for the thing you wanted.

Getting live: nobody publishes a figure

This is the finding we did not expect to be unanimous. All 6 of these products have to be set up. 3 of them describe that work on their own pages. None of them puts a number on it.

Official — Published by the vendor.

Two of those rows describe serious work. ServiceTitan documents a build with a consultant and data analysts on it and routes the training packages through your account manager. FieldEdge says onboarding is the reason it offers no trial — its team walks you through it instead. Somebody is paid for both of those, and neither page says who pays or how much.

Be careful how you read the two blanks at the top of that column. Jobber and Housecall Pro simply do not raise setup beside their rates, and a vendor saying nothing is not a vendor saying it is free. It may well be included. We are recording that we asked the page and the page did not answer.

What to do with this

You cannot compare six products on the five lines above, because three of them will not tell you four of the five. What you can do is stop treating the tier figure as the comparison and start treating it as one line of five. For the three that publish, add the card cut on your real volume, the logins you will need in a year, and any add-on you would actually turn on — then see whether the order you started with survives it.

For the three that sell by quote, the five lines are the agenda for the call. Why three of these six vendors only give you a quote goes through what to get in writing.

Run your own numbers

Every fee, rate and add-on we hold, vendor by vendor: