Guide
The charges that sit outside a field service plan price
Updated
A plan price is where comparison starts and rarely where the invoice lands. The charges below are all published, all easy to miss, and between them they can move a first-year bill by more than the choice of vendor does.
The accounting sync is the expensive one
Kickserv includes QuickBooks Online on its cheapest plan and charges $50 a month more for QuickBooks Desktop, which is close to the entire cost of the $60 Start plan. A Desktop shop is really comparing $110.
Housecall Pro places QuickBooks Online sync on Essentials at $149, not Basic at $59. So the version of QuickBooks your bookkeeper runs can decide both your tier and your vendor, and it appears in no headline anywhere.
Setup fees are mostly gone, except where they are not
Only Ambs Call Center publishes one in this index, at $85 one time. Housecall Pro states no long term contracts and no setup fee is listed; ServiceM8 and Kickserv publish none.
The three vendors publishing no price at all also publish no setup fee, which is not the same as not charging one. For platforms sold to multi-truck operations, implementation is routinely a four figure line and it is the single most common surprise in year one.
Metered extras
ServiceM8 charges 10c per SMS on its free tier while paid plans include SMS free, and 20c per job beyond the Premium Plus allotment. Its phone add-on starts from $19 a month with a one month free trial.
Ambs Call Center meters minutes in 30 second increments rounded up, with excess from $1.29 to $1.20 a minute depending on plan. Rounding matters more than the rate on short calls: a 45 second call billed as a full minute costs about a third more than the same call metered to the second.
Payment processing, which nobody publishes
Kickserv's Kickback programme gives 5% off monthly fees for processing a minimum of $1,000 to $3,000 in online payments depending on plan. That discount is pointing at where the real revenue in this category sits: card processing, whose rate appears on none of these pricing pages.
Before signing anywhere, ask for the processing rate in writing and compare it with what you pay today. On a firm turning over real volume, half a point of processing outweighs the entire software subscription.