The cost engine
The monthly price is designed to feel small.
Nobody signs up to spend twenty thousand dollars. They sign up to spend $349 a month, which is a different feeling entirely and exactly the same money.
So here is the multiplication, done for you.Every figure below comes off the vendor’s own pricing page, with the date we read it. Four of them will not tell you the price at all, which is its own kind of answer.
Start with your own bill
You do not need our list. You need your number, times sixty.
Do it on your own number
Count everything: the subscription, the extra seats, SMS, card processing, the add-on nobody remembers approving. That total is what the software actually costs you.
Published prices
These six tell you what they charge. Here is what that becomes.
Job management for trades and field service, priced by how many jobs you run rather than how many people you employ.
Job management for trades, priced per user, so the bill grows with every hire.
Practice management for allied health, priced in bands by how many practitioners you have.
Job management for trades, priced flat by plan with separate meters for the people who only fill in timesheets.
Inventory and order management, priced flat by plan with a fixed number of users and a yearly order ceiling.
Practice workflow for accounting firms, priced per user with a real gap between paying monthly and paying annually.
No published price
These four make you ask. That is information too.
A price you cannot see is a price set against you rather than against the product. Two businesses of the same size routinely pay very different amounts for identical software, because the quote is shaped around what each one looks like it can afford.
We do not repeat the figures review sites carry for these four. They are third-party estimates, they disagree with each other, and printing a guess in a confident font is exactly the habit these pages exist to argue against.
Recruitment software. Four named tiers, no published price against any of them.
Real estate CRM, now sold under the Reapit Sales brand. Every path to a price runs through a demo booking.
Field service and project management for larger trade businesses. No published price, and the third-party guesses differ by more than double.
Australian field service management. The pricing page lists features and a Request Pricing button.
One page is deliberately missing. Xero Practice Manager is on our build list, but Xero blocks automated reads of its pricing page, so we have not been able to verify a figure from the vendor’s own site. It goes up when a human has checked it, not before.
The method
Four rules, so these pages stay worth reading.
The vendor’s own page
Every figure comes from the vendor’s published pricing, with the URL and the date it was read printed on the page. No aggregators, no averages, no memory.
Held flat, in their favour
Five-year totals assume today’s price never rises. It always does. We would rather understate the case than be accused of loading it.
Honest about the product
Every page says what the vendor is genuinely good at. Several of them we would actively tell you to stay on. A page that cannot do that is an advertisement.
And the fourth: no number we cannot source. Where a vendor will not publish, the page says so and shows you what to ask for instead. That is why one of the eleven planned pages is not here yet.
Common questions
About these numbers.
Where do these prices come from?
Each vendor's own pricing page, read on the date shown on that vendor's page here. Nothing on these pages is an estimate, an average or a figure from a review aggregator. Where a vendor does not publish a price, we say so instead of filling the gap.
Why five years?
Because that is roughly how long a business keeps a system before replacing it, and because a monthly number is designed to feel small. $349 a month is $20,940 over five years. Both figures are true and only one of them helps you decide.
Do you allow for price rises?
No, deliberately. Every total here assumes today's price holds flat for sixty months, which no vendor has ever done. The real figure is worse than the one printed, and we would rather be conservative in the vendor's favour than accused of loading the numbers.
Is a custom build always cheaper?
No. Below roughly $750 a month in software costs, a build usually does not pay for itself, and we tell people that on the call. These pages exist to help you work out which side of that line you are on, not to push everyone to the same answer.
How often are these prices re-checked?
Quarterly. Every vendor page carries the date it was last read, so you can see for yourself how fresh it is. A cost page with a stale price has nothing to offer.
My vendor is not on this list. Can you still do the sum?
Yes, and that is what the free cost check is. Twenty minutes, your invoices, every meter counted, five years out. You keep the numbers whether or not you go further.
Where to next
Bring the invoice, not the brochure.
Twenty minutes on a call. We count every meter you are actually paying, run it out five years, and tell you honestly whether a build is worth it for a business your size. You keep the numbers either way.