What contractor software costs per month, and over five years Four subscriptions stacked vs one system built for your shop

What contractor software costs per month: $450-900, and why the base plan never covers it

The number first, for an owner and four techs at the vendors' own October 2026 list prices:

• Jobber Connect, 5 users: $199 a month paying monthly, $149 if you prepay the year.
• CompanyCam Crew, 5 users: $187 a month billed annually ($129 for three users plus $29 for each added person).
• QuickBooks Online Essentials with payroll, 4 employees: $151 a month ($125 plus $6.50 per employee).
• GoHighLevel Starter plus text and email usage: about $127 a month.

That is $664 a month, $39,840 over five years. Annual billing, fewer photo seats and no payroll lands near $450; the plan the salesperson recommends on each product passes $900.

It stacks because no single tool does the whole job for a small crew. Jobber or Housecall Pro handles the schedule, the quote, the invoice and the card payment, but neither is an accounting system, so QuickBooks stays. Neither documents photos the way a GC or an adjuster expects, so CompanyCam gets added the first time a customer disputes what a wall looked like before demo. Neither does missed-call text-back, review requests or drip follow-up, so GoHighLevel becomes the fourth login.

Each one is reasonable alone. Nobody adds up the four.

The stack line by line, with the add-ons the pricing pages bury

Jobber

Jobber's pricing page shows Core at $49 a month for one user, Connect at $139 for one user and $199 once five people are on it, and Grow at $299 for five. Every added user is $29 a month. The big number on each card is a three-month introductory price; the real one follows the word "then".

CompanyCam

CompanyCam is Core at $63 a month (one user, two-user cap), Crew at $129 with three users, Scale at $199 with three users, and $29 for each added person, billed annually (monthly is about 20 percent more). Every tech taking photos puts you on Crew at $187.

QuickBooks Online

QuickBooks Online is $38 for Simple Start, $85 for Essentials (three users) and $140 for Plus (five users). The payroll bundles are $125 a month plus $6.50 per employee with Essentials, or $203 plus $10 per employee with Plus.

The add-ons nobody adds up

• Seats. Hire one tech and the software bill rises $58 a month before wages: $29 on Jobber, $29 on CompanyCam, plus $6.50 if QuickBooks runs payroll.
• Card processing. Call it 3 percent on $400,000 of collected work: $12,000 a year, more than the subscriptions.
• Annual prepay. The discount is real, and so is the year you cannot leave.

The calculator below has that four-tool stack loaded. Drag the time slider out to five years.

GoHighLevel's real bill: plan, usage, A2P, and what I still pay for

GoHighLevel's pricing page lists Starter at $97 a month, Unlimited at $297 and Agency Pro at $497, and marks texting, email, calling and the AI features "usage based charges apply": the number, texts and emails bill separately, by the message.

Most contractors buy it from a marketing agency that white-labels it, and the Agency Pro plan lists "Rebill Phone & Email with Markup" as a feature. So the $97 becomes whatever the agency charges, and the texts carry a markup too. That is the $197-to-$397 "CRM" line on an agency invoice.

Then there is A2P 10DLC, the carrier registration any business texting from a platform now needs. I did it myself in September for Style Marking's texting number: a business profile, a brand, a campaign, and a one-time passcode texted to my own phone to prove the brand was me.

Until the campaign was verified, every outbound text failed with carrier error 30034. The fees are small; Twilio lists a brand fee of about $4, a $15 campaign vetting fee and $2 a month per campaign for a sole proprietor. The real cost is the weeks of waiting, and an agency bills you for them.

The last cost never shows on an invoice: setting it up for clients, I have watched owners spend six to eight weeks of evenings on pipelines, calendars, forms and workflows, because GoHighLevel can do almost anything.

What I still pay for on my own site

On revisionsunlimited.com I still pay for GoHighLevel. It runs the chat widget, the estimate form and the calendar booking, and does all three fine.

If I replaced it tomorrow it would be three pieces I have built for other sites: a form that texts me the lead within seconds (I wrote that one up), a booking page tied to my calendar, and a chat box that lands in the same text thread. For a client, that is a set build price, then a monthly plan for the hosting and texting it uses; texts bill at Twilio's rate of about a penny a segment.

I have not done it yet because it works and a $97 line is not where my money goes. That is the honest version of "the off-the-shelf app sometimes wins".

ServiceTitan, Housecall Pro, and why small shops bounce

ServiceTitan's pricing page has three packages, Starter, Essentials and The Works, every one marked "Request Pricing"; the only number on the page is the phrase "per-technician pricing".

That tells you who it is for: a dispatch board with someone sitting at it, a CSR on a script, and enough trucks that a one-percent gain in booked calls pays for the software. Every owner I have talked to who priced it for four techs came back with a per-tech figure that made Jobber look cheap, plus onboarding and data-migration fees in the thousands.

Small shops bounce because at four techs the owner is the dispatcher, the CSR and the estimator. You pay for the board whether or not anyone sits at it.

Housecall Pro is the realistic alternative at this size. Its pricing is Basic at $79 for one user, Essentials at $189 for five, and Max at $329 for eight plus $35 per extra user. Five people is $189 against Jobber's $199: not a price decision, a which-screen-will-my-techs-actually-open decision.

And Jobber feels "so expensive" because the sticker you remember is $49 and the bill you get is $199 plus seats plus processing, for a tool that still needs three others beside it.

The 30-minute subscription audit: my own $273 a month and the three tools I built for myself instead

In September 2026 I ran a full-text search across 1,229 transactions, the 18 months of statements loaded into Fischer Books, the local bookkeeping app I built for my own three sets of books. Filtered for recurring charges, the subscription line came to about $273 a month inside a fixed burn of $3,425. That is more than a 4-tech shop's Jobber Connect bill, and I am a remodeler who writes software.

The uncomfortable part: most of it was not contractor software. It was tools for a trading side project, domains for software products that had never made a dollar, and streaming. The business tools I defend are a short list: Netlify hosting, Twilio for texts, Resend for email, the $99-a-year Apple Developer account, and the GoHighLevel line above. Everything else had to answer one question: who used this last week?

Three places where I built for myself instead of subscribing:

• Routing. Per-truck route software wanted $50 a seat or $199 to start, so I built my own snow route app in two weekends, laid out around how my storm days actually run.
• Bookkeeping. Instead of a QuickBooks subscription I built a local bookkeeping app that imports statements, categorizes by rules and packages the year for my CPA. It is the app that found the $273.
• Email and text at volume. Style Marking's outreach engine calls Resend and Twilio directly instead of paying per seat plus marked-up usage. My Resend account is capped at 100 emails a day, which says how little volume one shop needs.

Run it on your own books in 30 minutes

1. Export 12 months of the business card and bank account to a spreadsheet.
2. Sort by payee, then amount. Anything that hits three or more times at the same amount is a subscription. Then search by name: Jobber, Housecall, Intuit, CompanyCam, HighLevel, LeadConnector, Canva, Dropbox, GoDaddy.
3. Three columns per line: who used it last week, what it would cost to replace, and the renewal date.
4. Count seats against people. Compare each tool's user list with who logged in this month. Former employees and the bookkeeper's second login are the usual finds.
5. Bucket every line into keep, cancel or replace-by-build, and compare the third bucket's total with the $664 stack in the calculator above.

You will probably find two seats and one dead tool, and you will have your real monthly number.

What a one-system build includes, and the switching-cost trap

When I quote a single system for a 4-tech shop, this is the usual scope:

• A schedule and job board sized for your crew, on a phone.
• Quote to invoice to payment in one record, with the card link on your own Stripe account at the processor's rate and nobody's markup.
• Job photos on that record, before, during and after, with time and location.
• Customer texting from a number in your name: on-my-way, done-with-photo, review request, and the missed-call text-back.
• An estimate form and booking page on your website that text you the lead, an export your CPA can read, and a nightly backup you control.

What it leaves out, on purpose: payroll and tax filings (that is compliance, not software), a native App Store app, and full double-entry accounting.

The build is a set price, quoted up front once we have scoped how much of that list you need, then a monthly plan for only the services you use, like hosting, texting and support. It is priced to compete with the stack above, and our development team builds it around how your crew already works. A free quote spells out both, and the automation services page covers the smaller pieces.

Your data and the switching-cost trap

The five-year total is not the biggest cost of the stack. The trap is that every month you stay, leaving gets harder. By year three a shop has 4,000 photos in CompanyCam, 900 customers and every invoice in Jobber, and automations in GoHighLevel nobody remembers building. The exports exist, but photos come out of one tool, notes out of another, and the history never comes out. So you renew, the price goes up, and you renew.

In one system built for your shop, the data sits in accounts in your name, and every customer, job, photo and message is in a format your next developer, or your buyer, can read and export. It is the same reason I wrote about building a business a buyer would pay for: the records move with the company.

When off-the-shelf apps still win, and the test that flips it

I sell builds, so here is the other side.

• One or two people. Jobber Core at $49 or Housecall Pro Basic at $79 is the right answer. Build nothing yet.
• Your process changes every month. If you are still deciding how you quote and who texts the customer, stay on the apps while you figure it out. A custom system locks in a process; lock in a good one.
• Payroll, taxes, compliance. Stay on the subscription, always. You are paying for the liability they carry, not the screens.
• Nobody will steer it. A custom system needs one person in the shop who decides how it should work and speaks up when that changes. If that is not you, an off-the-shelf app's ready-made defaults are worth the money.
• The line is small and it works. My GoHighLevel bill is the example. If a tool costs less than an hour of your time a month, leave it alone.

The test that flips it: three or more users, a three-year horizon, a process you would not change, and a stack bill already past $500 a month. Five years of that is $30,000 and up, spread across four tools that each hold a piece of your records.

If that is you, send me the list from your audit and the number of people who log in through the contact page. I come back with a clear scope, a set build price and a monthly plan for only the services you would use. Our development team builds it, we work with shops anywhere remotely, and the Minnesota team can come out in person if you are close.

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