· Independent
Every vendor advertises a headline price for one user. Almost nobody runs a plumbing business with one user. A complete guide to what four systems really cost a four-person shop — including the largest cost, which none of them publish.
Loistrofi Editorial — Aug 21, 2026 — 12 min read
You run a plumbing business. You, plus three technicians in two vans. Jobs still go on a whiteboard, invoices get chased by text message, and last month you found a completed job nobody had billed for. So you have decided that this year you are finally buying software.
Ten minutes into the pricing pages, you realise none of them are answering your question. The prices on the front are for one user. You have four. And the moment you add the other three, every one of these products changes price in a way that is either buried three clicks down, unpublished entirely, or quoted only by a salesperson after a demo call.
This guide answers the question those pages avoid: what does field service software actually cost a four-person shop, what are you really buying, and what will hurt you in year two. Every price below comes from the vendor's own published pricing page, checked on the date shown at the bottom.
Before comparing anything, it helps to be precise about what you are buying, because "field service management" describes five separate jobs bundled into one subscription.
Scheduling and dispatch — the whiteboard. Who is going where, in what order, and what happens when the ten o'clock job runs three hours long. This is the part that saves you the most time immediately and the part every product does competently.
The mobile app — what the technician holds. Job details, parts used, photos, customer signature. This is where products separate, and it is the part you cannot evaluate from a website.
Quoting and invoicing — turning a finished job into a sent invoice without you re-typing anything at nine in the evening. The single biggest cash-flow change for most small shops is invoicing from the van instead of from the kitchen table three days later.
Payments — taking a card on site. Almost every vendor in this category makes more money from processing your payments than from your subscription. We will come back to this, because it matters more than the subscription price.
The customer record — history, addresses, equipment installed, what you charged last time. This is the asset that makes leaving a system painful, which is why you should ask about export before you sign, not after.
Figures below are for four users on each vendor's cheapest plan that permits four users. Where a vendor does not publish a price for that configuration, it is recorded as unpublished rather than estimated.
| System | Cheapest plan for 4 users | Billed annually | Billed monthly | Per year |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Housecall Pro | Essentials (5 seats) | $149/mo | $189/mo | $1,788 – $2,268 |
| Jobber | Grow (multi-user option) | $199/mo | Unpublished for 4 seats | $2,388+ |
| Workiz | Mid tier | ~$225/mo (reported) | Unpublished | ~$2,700 |
| ServiceTitan | Quote only | Unpublished | Unpublished | $14,400+ |
Two things jump out. The honest working range for a four-person shop is roughly **$1,800 to $2,700 a year** — not the $49 or $59 on the front of the pricing pages. And one of these numbers is not like the others.
Housecall Pro publishes what a small shop needs to know, which is rarer in this category than it should be. Basic is $59 a month billed annually, or $79 month to month, and covers one user. Essentials is $149 billed annually or $189 monthly and includes five users — your four plus one spare. Max is $299 annually or $329 monthly with eight users included.
The number that matters, and that most comparison articles omit: **additional users beyond the plan cost $100 a month each on Essentials, and $75 a month each on Max.**
That single fact changes the decision. Hire a fifth technician while on Essentials and you go from $149 to $249 a month — at which point Max, at $299 with eight seats, is obviously the better buy. If you expect to be six people within eighteen months, you are not really choosing between $149 and $299; you are choosing when to pay $299.
Jobber's plans run Core at $49 a month, Connect at $139, Grow at $199 and Plus at $499 as displayed — with a wrinkle worth understanding before you budget.
The displayed prices are annual-prepaid rates, and the first year carries a promotional discount that then reverts. Core shows $21 a month for twelve months before going to $29. Grow shows $105 a month for twelve months before going to $149. That structure is genuinely helpful for cash flow in year one and genuinely misleading if you plan around it. **Budget on the reversion price.**
The harder problem is seats. Core and Connect are single-user plans, so they are out for you regardless of price. Grow is where multi-user options begin, and Plus includes five users at $499. **Jobber does not publish a per-additional-user price** the way Housecall Pro does, which means a four-person shop cannot compute its own cost from the website.
That is not a reason to rule Jobber out — it is a well-regarded product, particularly for quoting and client-facing communication. But it does mean the comparison cannot be finished at your desk, and you should know that going in rather than discovering it after a demo.
Workiz sits in a similar band, with reported pricing running roughly $225 to $325 a month. We are flagging that as reported because the company does not publish a plain self-serve pricing table for multi-user accounts, and we do not present figures we could not confirm at source as though we had.
For a buyer, unpublished pricing is itself information. It usually means the price is negotiated, which means it varies depending on who is asking and when, and that the buying process will take longer than an afternoon. Whether that is worth your time depends on whether the first two have failed you on something specific.
ServiceTitan is the strongest product in this category. It is also priced for a business ten times your size. There is no public pricing page; it is sold through an enterprise process, with reported pricing around $300 to $500 per technician per month plus an implementation fee reported between $5,000 and $50,000.
Run the bottom of that range for four people and you get **$14,400 a year before implementation** — six to eight times Housecall Pro, for capability you will not use for years.
ServiceTitan starts making sense past roughly $2 million in revenue or several locations. The honest advice for a four-person shop is to not take the demo. It will be a very good demo. That is precisely the problem: you will spend an hour being shown reporting you would love to have and cannot yet justify.
Here is the part that changes the maths entirely, and it appears in none of the comparisons you will read.
Most of these products make more money processing your card payments than they do from your subscription. Rates in this category typically land somewhere between 2.5% and 3.5% per transaction, and the difference between the best and worst rate on offer is often close to a full percentage point.
Work it through. A four-person plumbing shop turning over $400,000 a year, with three quarters of that taken by card, is processing $300,000. **One percentage point on that is $3,000 a year** — more than the entire annual subscription difference between the cheapest and most expensive product on this list.
So: get the processing rate in writing before you sign, ask whether it is a flat rate or interchange-plus, and ask whether you are allowed to use your own processor instead. A slightly more expensive subscription with a materially better processing rate is the cheaper product, and almost nobody does this arithmetic.
Four questions decide whether the software survives contact with your business, and none of them appear on a features grid.
Does it work with no signal. Your technicians will be in basements, plant rooms and crawl spaces. Ask specifically whether the mobile app can open a job, add parts, take photos and capture a signature with no connection, and what happens when it reconnects — does it sync silently or does the technician have to remember to do something. "We have a mobile app" does not answer this question. Ask for it to be demonstrated in aeroplane mode.
What does leaving cost. Ask how you export customers, job history, and job photos, in what format, and whether it is self-serve or a support ticket. Photos are the one people forget: three years of before-and-after job photos are your defence in a dispute, and a system that will not hand them back has effectively taken your records hostage.
What are the payment processing rates. As above. This is the largest number in the decision and it is never on the pricing page.
How many seats until the next price cliff. You now know Housecall Pro's cliff sits at the sixth user. Ask every vendor the same question in the same words, write the answers down, and compare those before you compare features.
You do not need a procurement process. You need five working days and a shortlist of two.
Pick the two products whose published pricing fits your headcount — for most four-person shops that is Housecall Pro and Jobber. Start both free trials on the same Monday. Then run the same real week through both: take your three most typical job types, enter them properly, dispatch them to a real technician, and invoice them.
The thing you are testing is not the feature list. It is whether your least technical technician will actually use it on a Thursday afternoon in a wet basement. If the answer is no, every other advantage is theoretical. Ask that technician directly at the end of the week, and weight their answer above your own — you are not the one who has to use it standing up.
For a four-person plumbing business that wants to decide this month and know what it is paying, **Housecall Pro Essentials is the defensible choice**: roughly $1,788 a year on annual billing, five seats included, and the per-user overage published so you can see the next cliff before you reach it.
Jobber Grow is the stronger option for a business that intends to be ten people within two years, and worth the enquiry to get a firm four-seat number. Workiz is worth investigating only if the first two have failed on a specific requirement you can name. ServiceTitan is a good product to remember for the day you have twenty technicians, and to ignore entirely until then.
Whichever you choose, negotiate the card processing rate before you sign. It is worth more than the subscription.
Loistrofi does not take vendor briefings or speak to sales teams. Every figure here comes from a page the vendor publishes itself, checked on 21 August 2026. Where a number could not be confirmed at source, it is marked rather than smoothed over.
