How pricing works
We don't publish a price list. This page explains why, and it explains exactly what drives the number you'll actually be quoted.
Why we don't publish a price list
Every project we've built has been different enough in scope that a single number, or even a range, would either mislead the businesses it's supposed to help or narrow us into quoting badly on the next job. One engagement was a full dispatch, quoting, invoicing and document-archive system with three staff roles and a 42,000-file legacy migration. Another was a scheduling board with a QuickBooks Desktop integration built against the vendor's own qbXML protocol, deliberately scoped to avoid touching certificates, tags, or anything physical. Those two projects do not belong on the same price list, and a number that tried to cover both would be honest about neither.
There's a second, more practical reason. A published band gives a competitor a number to undercut and gives us less room to price a genuinely unusual piece of scope on its merits. We'd rather quote you correctly, in writing, after we understand the job, than publish a figure that has to be hedged so heavily it stops meaning anything.
We'd rather you read this page, understand exactly what moves the price, and come to a call already knowing what to expect from us, than read three digits on a landing page that may not apply to your business at all.
What actually drives the cost
How many systems have to talk to each other
A standalone tool built once, from scratch, is the cheapest shape. Cost climbs when the work has to connect to something you already run — QuickBooks Desktop over the Web Connector, an existing CRM, a phone system, a payment processor. Each integration is its own scoped piece of work, not a checkbox.
How much of your history has to move
A fresh start is fast. Migrating years of records is not. One engagement moved roughly 42,000 legacy files into a per-client document archive, and another had to reconcile a roughly-490-row accounts receivable spreadsheet with duplicate and hidden rows before a single new invoice could go out. That kind of cleanup is real, billable work, and we scope it honestly rather than pretending it happens for free.
How many roles need different permissions
A single-user tool is simple. A system with an admin, an office coordinator and a technician role, each seeing only what they're allowed to see, takes more design and more testing. One build ran automated tests that scan the actual rendered HTML a technician's phone shows, checking for the literal absence of dollar signs and pricing, because 'the template doesn't show it' is not the same guarantee as a test that checks.
How much the mistakes cost if we get it wrong
Money math, invoice numbering and overtime rules get tested harder than everything else, because a bug there costs you real dollars, not just an annoyance. One pricing and overtime engine ran a 20-case table-driven test suite before it touched a live invoice. That level of testing takes time, and time is the largest input into any quote.
Whether it needs to run unattended, on a schedule
Recurring and contract billing, GPS-flagged auditing, scheduled reports — anything that has to keep working correctly with nobody watching it needs more design up front than a tool a person operates by hand each time.
The shapes an engagement takes
A fixed-scope build
You have a specific, describable problem: dispatch is done over group chat, quotes come out of a Word template, invoices get re-typed into QuickBooks from a paper form. We scope the exact deliverable, agree it in writing, and quote a fixed price for that scope. This is most of our work.
A phased build
Larger systems get built in stages, each with its own scope and its own sign-off, rather than one large undertaking with a single price at the end. A recurring-contract billing engine, for example, can be built and shipped after the core work-order and invoicing flow is already live and in daily use, as a separate phase with its own scope.
Ongoing care after launch
Once a system is live, most clients keep us on to monitor it, apply fixes, and make small refinements as the business changes. This is billed separately from the build itself, and it is optional. Nothing about the build requires you to keep paying us afterward.
What discovery actually looks like
We ask for the thing most vendors skip: your own words for the problem. The most useful input we've ever received on a real project was a client's own requirements email, written in plain language about how their office actually worked day to day — which fields had to be mandatory, which numbers got added by hand every week, which conversation with the crew had already gone badly once before. That document did more to shape the eventual build, and its price, than any spec we could have written for them.
So a discovery conversation is us asking you to walk through how a job actually moves through your business today: what's on paper, what's in a spreadsheet, what gets re-typed a second time, what gets missed when someone's on vacation. We ask about your existing tools by name, because "integrate with your accounting software" and "integrate with QuickBooks Desktop over the Web Connector" are two different scopes of work with two different prices.
From that conversation we write a scope, in plain language, that describes exactly what gets built and what doesn't. You get a fixed quote against that scope before any code is written. If, partway through discovery, it becomes clear that an off-the-shelf product genuinely serves you better, we say that instead of quoting anyway.
What we won't do
- —Start building before the scope is written down and you have agreed to it. A verbal understanding is not a scope.
- —Quote a number before we understand what you actually need. A price given before a discovery conversation is a guess wearing a suit.
- —Sell you a monthly subscription to software you could instead own outright. If a fixed build genuinely serves you better than a retainer, we say so.
- —Recommend a custom build when an off-the-shelf product is honestly the better buy. See the note below — we mean this.
- —Lock you into paying us forever for something we built for you. You own the code and the data when the engagement ends.
When a custom build isn't the right answer
Our own research into off-the-shelf field-service software concluded, plainly, that Jobber is honestly the better product for a small crew on pure feature-for-dollar terms. Jobber's Connect plan runs about $105-149/month for a 5-user bracket (annual billing, year-one promo to renewal rate), Housecall Pro about $149-189/month, and ServiceTitan about $1,000-2,000+/month before add-ons, checked 2026-08-28, plus an additional implementation fee and a multi-year contract that reviewers commonly describe as substantial, though we couldn't independently verify a specific fee amount or contract length. For a shop that needs standard scheduling, invoicing and dispatch with no unusual rule that a generic product doesn't already handle, a monthly subscription to one of those tools will very likely cost less over five years than a custom build, and it comes with a vendor support line we cannot offer.
Custom work earns its cost when there's a specific rule a generic product doesn't do out of the box: automatic overtime calculated under two non-stacking rules with the reason shown in plain text on the signed document, GPS auditing that only ever fires on a deliberate tap because a covert version was a deal-breaker the last time it was tried, or a two-role permission model where a technician's screen is tested by machine to contain zero dollar figures, not just hidden by a template.
Zero per-seat licensing cost is also not the same thing as zero cost. Someone still has to design, build, test and maintain a custom system, and that cost doesn't disappear — it just moves from a monthly bill to a build and a maintenance relationship. Whether that trade is worth it depends entirely on how long you'll run the system and what the subscription would otherwise have cost you. We'll tell you the honest answer for your business, even when it points you at someone else's product.
Work the numbers yourself
The calculator and the pricing research behind the maths above.
Tool
Cost of Per-Seat Software Calculator
Work out your own five-year per-seat cost against a one-time build, with your real seat count.
Guide
What Field Service Software Actually Costs in Canada
Verified 2026 pricing for Jobber, Housecall Pro, FieldPulse, Zuper and ServiceTitan, plus the five-year maths.
Comparisons
Compare Your Options
Head-to-head comparisons that name the case where the off-the-shelf product wins.
Talk through your scope, no obligation
Bring your paper forms, your spreadsheets, or just a description of what's going wrong. We'll tell you honestly whether a custom build makes sense before we quote anything.
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