What does your software actually cost?
Add it up. All of it.
1 subscription never stays 1 subscription. Add every tool you pay for, add the hours your office spends re-typing data between them, and see your stack's true annual cost.
Step 1: Build your stack
Pick a tool and we pre-fill its published price (Jobber at the 1-year-commitment monthly rate, Housecall Pro at the annual-billing rate; sources and dates are in Methodology below). ServiceTitan, Buildertrend, and Procore do not publish pricing, so you enter what you actually pay. Every number stays editable; make it match your real bill.
Step 2: Price the office time
Use the loaded hourly cost of whoever does the re-typing. If that person is you, use what an hour of your time should be worth.
Step 3: What your stack costs
What you get for the money
A claim-by-claim look at the 2 platforms with published pricing we audited, next to Best Decision Project Tools. "Not advertised" means the feature does not appear in that vendor's published plan-feature table on the date we checked; sources and dates are in Methodology below.
| Feature | Jobber | Housecall Pro | Best Decision Project Tools See current pricing |
|---|---|---|---|
| Price and users | |||
| Users included at the listed price | 10 on Grow, then $29/user/mo | 1 to 8 by tier, then $35/user/mo at MAX | 20 users, then $5/seat |
| Same price month-to-month as annual? | No. Grow is $399 month-to-month vs $299 prepaid annual | No. $20 to $40 more per month without annual billing | Yes. 1 price either way |
| Job costing | |||
| Job costing at the entry plan | No. Grow plan and up only | Yes. Listed from Basic | Yes. 1 plan, no feature gating |
| Subcontractor costs as their own cost track | Not advertised | Not advertised | Yes. Materials, labor, and subs tracked separately |
| QuickBooks integration | |||
| Invoices, payments, customers sync to QuickBooks Online | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Expenses and receipts sync to QuickBooks Online | No. Expenses are not synced, on any plan | No. Revenue-side data only | Yes. Receipts sync as expenses with vendor and category mapping |
| AI-transcribed receipts queued to the books with a job tag | Not advertised | Not advertised | Yes |
| Communication | |||
| Per-job chat that auto-posts photos, receipts, and schedule changes | Not advertised | Not advertised | Yes |
| Real-time translation inside the job chat | Spanish app available; in-chat translation not advertised | English and Spanish app; in-chat translation not advertised | Yes. Each reader sees their own language |
| Financial visibility | |||
| CFO-level dashboard: did each job make money after overhead? | Not advertised | Not advertised | Yes. CFO Dashboard included |
| Marketing tools at no extra cost | No. Marketing Suite is a $79/mo add-on below the $699 Plus tier | No. Campaigns, Pipeline, and Websites are add-ons; prices not published | Yes. Marketing ROI dashboard included |
ServiceTitan sells its Marketing Pro suite as a paid add-on with no published price, and does not publish base pricing. Buildertrend publishes no pricing at all; both are quote-based. Using something we have not audited? Pull up its published plan table and walk these same rows.
Methodology and sources
Every pre-filled price and every competitor claim in this tool traces to a published source, checked on the date shown. Your own inputs and the math computed from them are your scenario, not industry data.
From Behind the Books · The show
The episode behind this calculator.
Joe takes apart a real $576-a-month contractor software stack on Behind the Books: what actually syncs to your books, what never does, and why none of it can tell you whether the last job made money.
Watch on YouTube →
Companion toolkit
Run the stack audit on paper.
This calculator totals what your tools cost. The free Software Stack Cost Calculator workbook lets you audit every tool in one place — visible bill, hidden re-entry time, and the one honest question that decides it all: does this tool get my costs into my books, by job?
- ■ Software Stack Cost Calculator (Excel) — every tool, monthly cost, what it syncs, and your true annual + 5-year total