What job software actually costs, and the four ways it's priced

Every product in this category leads with a monthly figure, and it's the least useful number in the decision. Two products advertising £25 can cost you £25 and £102 for the same year, depending on how many people you employ and how many jobs you run.

Here's how the pricing actually works, how to get to your own number, and where the costs hide.

The four ways it's priced

Flat. One price, whatever your headcount. Around £25 a month at the small-business end. Predictable, and it stops mattering how many people you add — which cuts both ways, because if you're on your own you're paying for headroom you don't use.

Per user. Roughly £28 to £34 per person per month at entry level. Fine for a sole trader, and the model that quietly punishes growth: three people is about £84 to £102 a month for the same class of product, and taking someone on adds another £28 to £34 before they've done a day's work.

Capped. A low price with a ceiling attached. ServiceM8's entry plan is £25 a month and doesn't count users at all — it counts jobs, and stops at fifty a month. Cross that line regularly and you're on the £59 tier, so the real price depends on your volume rather than your headcount. Whether that's the sharpest deal in the category or an expensive surprise depends entirely on your job mix — which is the point below.

Not published. Some products don't put a UK price on their site at all. Jobber and Fergus both fall here. That's a pricing model too: it usually means a conversation, and often a price that varies by who's asking.

Working out your own number

Three steps, five minutes:

1. Count the people who'd need a login — including anyone office-side, and anyone you expect to take on this year.
2. Multiply properly. Per-user prices are per user. The advertised figure is for one.
3. Count your jobs in a typical month and check it against any cap.

Worth doing at the headcount you expect rather than the one you have, because switching later is its own cost.

For what it's worth, ours is £25 a month with one admin and two crew included, £10 a month for an extra admin and £5 for extra crew — so a sole trader pays £25, a three-person team pays £25, and a five-person team pays £35. The full comparison has the current figures for the others, each read off their own pricing page, with the date they were checked.

The four things the sticker price hides

VAT. Some publish excluding it, some including. If your business isn't VAT registered you can't reclaim it, so an ex-VAT price is 20% higher than it looks to you. Check which you're reading — it's the difference between £28 and £33.60 per user. Ours is £25 flat with nothing added, because we're not VAT registered.

The tier above. Online quote acceptance, deposits, job photos, customer portals and timesheets all sit above the entry plan somewhere in this market. Price the plan that has the thing you actually need, not the one at the top of the page.

Annual commitments. A discounted annual price is a bet on two things: that the product suits you, and that its pricing holds. The second is less safe than it sounds. Between May and August 2026, of the five products we track, Tradify moved from a flat one-to-three-user tier to £34 per user, and Powered Now went from £15 to £28. Three months.

Your own time. Setup, importing customers, learning it, and the fortnight where you're running two systems. Nobody quotes this and it's usually the biggest cost in year one. It's also the honest reason not to switch on a whim.

Is there a free option?

Not one most trades would stay on. There are free trials, typically 14 to 30 days, and free tiers capped tightly enough that a working business outgrows them in weeks.

But there is a genuinely free option, and it's worth naming because the category rarely does: your accounting software already sends invoices, your phone already has a calendar, and a spreadsheet holds a customer list perfectly well. For a few jobs a month, that stack costs nothing extra and works. The reason to leave it isn't that it's unprofessional — it's the point where quotes start going out too slowly to win, or invoices get forgotten. Not before.

When someone else is the cheaper buy

Three cases where we're not the answer, since a pricing post that can't say this isn't worth reading:

• A bigger team doing a small number of large jobs. If you're five or six people doing fifteen big installs a month, a £25 unlimited-user plan with a fifty-job cap is better value than paying us for seats. The cap only bites if you're high-volume — which is why a builder and a plumber should read that same offer completely differently.
• You only need invoices. If the work in front of the invoice is under control and you're only ever raising bills, Xero on its own may be all you need, and a second subscription buys you nothing.
• Your current system works. The cheapest option in this market is not changing. If nothing is slipping, there is no saving to make.

Where flat pricing wins is the case in between: a small team that's growing, doing enough jobs to blow a cap, and tired of a bill that goes up every time someone joins.

The number to compare on

Not the headline. Take the model, your headcount, your job volume, and the tier that actually has what you need, and produce one figure: what this costs me per month, a year from now. Then compare those.

It's a five-minute sum and it routinely changes the answer, because the cheapest-looking product at one person is frequently the most expensive at four.

If you want to see the working for the products we track, it's on our pricing page, dated, with each figure taken from the vendor's own site. And if you're still deciding what to compare beyond price, what actually differs between them covers the other five things worth weighing.