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You didn't pick the wrong software. You outgrew its pricing model. Here is the math, from the vendors' own pages — and what the option nobody puts on the comparison lists actually looks like.
By Phong Bui — Founder, Nexcore Solutions, Houston, TX · pricing figures checked August 2026
Every field-service platform worth using prices one of two ways: per technician, or in tiers that cap your user count. Both are fine at six techs. Both start working against you somewhere around fifteen. This is not a flaw in any one product — it is what a subscription has to do — but it means the bill grows precisely in step with the thing you are trying to do: grow.
Per getjobber.com/pricing (checked August 2026): the top "Plus" tier is $399/month billed annually for 15 users, plus $29/month for every additional user — and every tier below adds users at the same $29. A 25-person operation on Plus lands around $689/month annually billed, before add-ons like Marketing Suite ($99/mo). To Jobber's credit, the page lists no setup fees and a true month-to-month option exists.
Its pricing page (servicetitan.com/pricing, checked August 2026) lists three tiers — Starter, Essentials, The Works — each ending in "Request Pricing." What the page does confirm is the model: "our per-technician pricing is designed to fit your business and goals." Third parties who track it report base rates in the $250–500 per technician per month range, with implementation fees reported from $5,000 to past $25,000 — reported figures from Projul, RivetOps and FieldCamp; ServiceTitan itself confirms none of them. Contractors' own accounts run the same direction: in one widely-read HVAC forum thread (2022, so treat the figures as historical), one owner described paying roughly $350 per employee per month while another with 80 techs was quoted $125 per tech. The pattern in every account is the same: the rate is real money, it is per person, and it is negotiated — which means it is also renegotiated.
Basic $59, Essentials $149, MAX $299 per month billed annually (housecallpro.com/pricing, checked August 2026), with additional users at $35/month listed under MAX. How many users each tier includes is not stated on the page; card processing runs 2.59%+ and bank payments 1%.
Run the per-tech model forward. At $300/tech/month — inside every reported ServiceTitan range — twenty technicians is $72,000 a year, every year, before add-ons, and the price of hiring tech twenty-one now includes a permanent software line item. The subscription never finishes. Ten years in, you have paid for the system many times over and you still don't own anything: stop paying and the software — with your workflow inside it — walks away.
There is a second cost that never shows on a pricing page. A platform serving a hundred thousand contractors is built for the average one. If your dispatch rules, your safety gates, your invoicing quirks are not average, you either bend the business to fit the software or pay staff to bridge the gap with spreadsheets on the side — which is the exact arrangement you bought the software to end.
Honestly: often. Under roughly ten field staff, standard workflows, no unusual compliance or approval chains — Jobber and Housecall Pro are good products at fair published prices, and ServiceTitan is a serious enterprise platform with capabilities a custom build has to earn slice by slice. If a stock tier fits how you actually work, buy the stock tier. A custom system is the wrong answer to a problem a $149/month plan solves.
The people this page is for are the ones in the middle: big enough that per-seat math hurts, particular enough that the stock workflow doesn't fit, told by one vendor they're too small and by their spreadsheet that they're too big.
A custom operating system is a capital build, not a subscription: quoting, dispatch, scheduling, invoicing, field ops and reporting in one platform, shaped to your workflow instead of the average contractor's, with no per-seat pricing on your own operations — the twenty-first technician costs you a phone. You own the code, the database, the hosting; fire the builder and the system keeps running.
What determines the price is scope, not headcount — which flows, which gates, which integrations (QuickBooks, Stripe, maps, payroll). At Nexcore that number is fixed in writing after a scoping call, before any work starts, and every build ships through a six-step verified loop with the documentation to hold us to it — the method is public on the factory page, including the figures we can source (683 of 683 tests passing on a live field-service platform in production, as of August 2026) and none we can't.
Count the next three years of subscription at your real seat count, including the add-ons you actually use. That is the budget a custom build competes against.
List the workarounds every spreadsheet, group text, and "call the office to check" that exists because the software doesn't fit. Each one is a cost the subscription hides.
Ask who owns the data and what leaving would take. If the answer involves "export to CSV and start over," weigh that.
If a stock tier fits, take it. Custom is for when the fit, the seat math, or the ownership fails — not for its own sake.
Get any custom quote fixed and in writing before work starts, with "done" defined. That last one applies to us too. Especially to us.
Read next: Off-the-shelf or custom? The decision guide — the six signals you've outgrown the template, beyond the price.