Methodology

This site exists because field service vendors make cost comparison hard. Our only asset is being right, so here is exactly how we work.

Where the numbers come from

Every figure is taken from the vendor’s own public pricing page and stored with its source URL and the date it was captured. Nothing is copied from review sites or other comparison articles.

What we do when a vendor hides pricing

We say so, and we publish nothing else. Workiz is the clearest example: its pricing URL returns a 404, and public sources contradict each other. The per-user surcharge is reported both as $30 and as $46–54, and plans appear as $187/$229/$270 and also as “from $225”. Repeating any of those as fact would make this site as unreliable as the pages we are trying to replace.

What we do not claim

We have not run these products on live job sites, and we do not pretend otherwise. You will not find “we tested this across 200 service calls” here, because it would not be true. What we do instead is the tedious, unglamorous work nobody else keeps current: tracking list prices, per-seat surcharges, payment processing rates, contract terms and renewal traps, with dates attached.

For hands-on workflow opinions, trade subreddits and your own free trial will serve you better than any comparison site.

How the calculator works

For each vendor we evaluate every published plan, discard any that cannot cover your crew size or job volume, add the per-seat surcharge where one applies, and return the cheapest plan that actually fits. Annual billing is assumed. Introductory rates that expire are excluded from the headline figure, because a price that lasts three months is not a price.

How we handle card processing

Card fees are calculated as your monthly card volume multiplied by the vendor’s published percentage, plus the published per-transaction fee multiplied by your volume divided by your average invoice. We include them because for most contractors they cost several times the subscription, and leaving them out produces a ranking that is confidently wrong.

Two honesty notes on this. First, we use the standard domestic card rate; American Express, international cards, keyed-in transactions and instant payouts can all cost more, so treat our figure as a floor. Second, where a vendor publishes only a floor rate we mark every derived number with an asterisk. Housecall Pro is the case in point: it publishes “as low as 2.59%” and no per-transaction fee, so our Housecall Pro figures assume the best possible rate and a zero transaction fee. That flatters them, and it still does not make them cheapest in most scenarios.

We do not model interchange-plus versus flat-rate structures, negotiated rates, or surcharging programs. If you process serious volume, a payment specialist will beat any published rate, including ours.

Corrections

Prices change and we will sometimes be stale or wrong. If you find an error, the fastest fix is to send the vendor page that contradicts us, and we will update the entry and its capture date.