What field service software does for a trade shop
It follows one job from the first phone call to the money in the bank, and it keeps the history so the next call is easier. Say a homeowner calls at 7:40 on a Monday because the water heater in the garage is leaking. Here's what a good system handles:
- The request. The office creates the customer and the job in one screen, or the homeowner books a slot through your website. The system checks whether this address is already a customer and shows the last three visits.
- The quote. The tech or office builds a quote from your price book: a 50-gallon gas tank, expansion tank, permit and haul-away. The homeowner approves it on their phone and pays a deposit if you require one.
- Scheduling and dispatch. The job lands on a tech's calendar. The homeowner gets a reminder the night before and an on-my-way text when the truck leaves the last job.
- In the field. The tech sees the address, gate code, notes, past equipment and photos. They take before-and-after photos, tick off a checklist, add the parts they used and get a signature.
- Invoice and payment. The invoice builds itself from the job. The customer taps to pay by card in the driveway or by ACH from an emailed link. If it's still unpaid in a week, the system sends a reminder without anyone in the office remembering to.
- Accounting. The invoice and payment sync to QuickBooks Online, so your bookkeeper isn't keying in tickets.
- The next call. A review request goes out the next morning. A year later, the system reminds the customer that the anode rod and flush are due.
What it doesn't do: payroll taxes (ServiceTitan's top plan is the exception), full accounting, or long construction projects with draws, change orders and subcontractor schedules. If most of your revenue comes from multi-week jobs, you want project software like Buildertrend or Contractor Foreman instead.
Signs your shop is ready for it
Plenty of one-truck operators run fine on a notebook, a phone calendar and QuickBooks. The time to buy is when the paperwork starts costing you jobs or money. Watch for these:
- Tickets get typed twice. The tech fills out a paper ticket or a text, and someone in the office retypes it into QuickBooks at night. Every retype is a chance to drop a part or a labor hour.
- Finished jobs sit uninvoiced. Count them on a Friday afternoon. If there's more than a handful of completed jobs without an invoice, you're lending your customers money for free.
- Quotes die quietly. You sent eleven quotes last month and can't say which ones got a follow-up call. Automatic follow-ups (Jobber Connect and up, for example) recover work you already paid to estimate.
- Customers call to ask where the tech is. That's office time spent on a question an on-my-way text answers.
- Maintenance agreements live on a whiteboard. If renewals and spring tune-ups depend on someone remembering, some of them don't happen, and that's your steadiest revenue walking away.
- You can't say which jobs made money. Job costing won't fix pricing on its own, but you can't fix what you can't see.
If you're already on software and hitting walls, the signs look different. You're paying for a top tier to get one feature. You're exporting to spreadsheets to answer basic questions. Your techs have stopped using the app and gone back to texting the office. Any of those is a reason to price the alternatives, but check first whether the next tier up on your current system solves it. Switching costs a few weeks of disruption no matter which way you go.
How the picks compare
Jobber versus Housecall Pro is the real decision for most shops. At five users they cost the same, $149/mo billed annually. The difference is what lands in that tier. Housecall Pro Essentials gives you flat-rate pricing, employee GPS, checklist automations, photo reports, commissions and QuickBooks sync. Jobber Connect gives you automatic reminders, quote and invoice follow-ups, time tracking and QuickBooks sync, but waits until Grow ($229 for five users) for optional line items, job costing and two-way texting. Jobber is cheaper at the bottom ($29 Core against $59 Basic) and cheaper at fifteen users ($399 on Grow against $544 on Housecall Pro MAX). Our lean: lawn care, cleaning, window washing and other recurring residential work go Jobber. HVAC and plumbing shops that sell flat-rate repairs and maintenance plans go Housecall Pro, and should budget for MAX if service plans are a big part of revenue.
Per-seat pricing punishes growth; flat pricing rewards it. Jobber and Housecall Pro charge more as you add people. Service Fusion charges the same $208/mo on Starter whether you have three users or thirty. Kickserv bundles five, ten or twenty users into each tier. ServiceM8 ignores users entirely and charges by job count. If you're hiring, run the math at the headcount you expect next year, not the one you have today.
Quote-only vendors aren't worse products, but they cost you bargaining power. ServiceTitan, FieldPulse and Workiz all require a sales conversation. That's fine if you go in prepared: get the quote in writing, ask for the year-two renewal price, and ask for every add-on you'd actually turn on (phones, AI answering, fleet tracking, marketing) priced on the same page. Third-party estimates help you sanity-check a quote, but they aren't the vendor's price.
Trade-specific tools beat all eight in some trades. Pest control operators who need chemical application logs and state reporting usually belong in PestPac, FieldRoutes or GorillaDesk. Pool service companies tracking chemical readings by pool do better in Skimmer. Roofers chasing insurance supplements need JobNimbus or AccuLynx. The trade pages linked below go through each.
Buying checklist
Run every finalist through these before you sign anything:
- Count users the way the vendor does. Housecall Pro Essentials includes five users and MAX includes eight. Jobber prices in 1, 5, 10 and 15-user brackets. Does the office manager count? The part-time helper? Your spouse who does the books on Sunday?
- Ask for the year-two price. Intro promos (Housecall Pro has shown $26 for the first month) and annual discounts are real, but you'll live with the renewal price.
- Find the QuickBooks tier. Jobber syncs from Connect up and Housecall Pro from Essentials up. Buying the cheaper tier and keying invoices by hand is false economy.
- Get the payment rates in writing. Jobber charges 2.9% + 30¢ for cards and 1% for ACH; Housecall Pro starts at 2.59% for cards and 1% for ACH. On $40,000 a month of card payments, a few tenths of a percent is hundreds of dollars a year.
- Test the app on your techs' actual phones. ServiceM8 works best on iPhone. If half your crew carries Android, test it there. Ask what happens when a tech loses signal in a basement or crawlspace.
- Read the add-on list. Service Fusion charges $60/mo for job costing and $149/mo for service agreements; Jobber's Marketing Suite is $99/mo; Workiz sells phones and answering separately. Price the setup you'll actually run.
- Confirm you can export your data. You want customers, jobs, invoices and equipment history out as spreadsheets if you ever leave.
- Plan the trial around real work. Workiz gives you 7 days, Jobber and Housecall Pro 14, Kickserv 30. Line up a week of real jobs and two techs before you click start.
Pricing comparison
Published prices as of October 2026. "Annual" means billed annually; monthly billing costs more. Quote-only vendors show third-party estimates, which the vendors don't publish.
| Software |
Entry price |
5-user team |
How it's priced |
Free trial |
| Jobber |
$29/mo (Core, 1 user, annual) |
$149/mo (Connect) or $229/mo (Grow), annual |
User brackets: 1, 5, 10, 15 |
14 days |
| Housecall Pro |
$59/mo (Basic, 1 user, annual) |
$149/mo (Essentials, annual) |
Plans with included users |
14 days |
| Service Fusion |
$208/mo (Starter, annual) |
$208/mo (unlimited users) |
Flat per plan |
None listed |
| FieldPulse |
Quote only |
About $150 to $750/mo (estimate) |
Per seat, custom |
None listed |
| ServiceTitan |
Quote only |
About $1,225 to $2,500/mo (estimate) |
Per technician |
None listed |
| Workiz |
Quote only |
Quote only |
Custom quote |
7 days |
| Kickserv |
$60/mo (Start, 5 users) |
$60/mo |
Plans with included users, 20% off annual |
30 days |
| ServiceM8 |
Free (1 user, 30 jobs/mo) |
$29 to $149/mo, depending on job volume |
Jobs per month, unlimited users |
14 days |
The gap widens as you grow. Here's what the published-price tools cost at ten and fifteen users:
| Software and plan |
10 users |
15 users |
| Jobber Connect (annual) |
$229/mo |
$299/mo |
| Jobber Grow (annual) |
$299/mo |
$399/mo |
| Housecall Pro MAX (annual, 8 users + $35 each) |
$369/mo |
$544/mo |
| Service Fusion Starter to Pro (annual) |
$208 to $533/mo |
$208 to $533/mo |
| Kickserv Run / Scale |
$119/mo (Run) |
$199/mo (Scale, up to 20 users) |
Here's how that plays out for a hypothetical five-tech residential HVAC shop that sells maintenance agreements and wants job costing, all billed annually. Jobber Grow covers five users with job costing for $2,748 a year, though its pricing page doesn't list a membership or service-plan feature, so agreements would run as recurring jobs. Housecall Pro MAX, the tier with recurring service plans, is $3,588 a year and leaves room for three more users. Service Fusion Starter with the service agreements ($149/mo) and job costing ($60/mo) add-ons comes to about $5,004 a year, but it never charges for another user. ServiceTitan, on third-party estimates, lands somewhere between $14,700 and $30,000 a year before implementation. For this shop, Housecall Pro MAX is the sensible middle.
Then add the costs that don't show up on the pricing page. Card processing is the big one: at 2.9% + 30¢, a shop running $40,000 a month through cards pays about $1,160 a month before per-transaction fees, which is more than any subscription here except ServiceTitan's. Push large tickets and commercial accounts to ACH at 1%. After that, budget for the add-ons you'll actually turn on and an evening or two a week of office time during the first month of setup.
What to set up first
Do it in this order and the first month goes much smoother:
- Clean the customer list, then import it. Merge duplicates, delete dead numbers and split billing addresses from service addresses. Landlords and property managers with ten rentals need one billing contact and ten service locations, not ten customers.
- Build the price book with your top 30 items. Your most common services, parts and fees cover most tickets. Add the long tail as it comes up instead of spending two weeks entering every fitting.
- Connect QuickBooks before the first invoice. Map your income accounts, sales tax and payment deposits. Decide that invoices are created in the field software and pushed to QuickBooks, never edited in both.
- Turn on payments. Set up card and ACH, decide your deposit rules for big jobs, and make sure techs can take payment in the driveway.
- Build job templates and checklists. A maintenance visit checklist for HVAC, a startup checklist for irrigation, a punch list for installs. This is what makes jobs consistent across techs.
- Set customer notifications. Booking confirmations, day-before reminders and on-my-way texts cut no-shows and "where's the tech" calls.
- Put the techs on the app with real jobs. Two techs, a week of actual work, during the trial. Their complaints are the most useful information you'll get.
- Then automate. Review requests, quote follow-ups, service reminders and marketing campaigns come last, once the basics run without you watching them.
