What trade and construction software
actually costs.

The monthly licence is the part everyone compares and rarely the largest number. A realistic figure for the first year includes the licence, implementation or setup, data migration, training time taken from people who are also doing their jobs, and the annual uplift written into the renewal. Ask for all five before comparing anything.

The four pricing models, and what each one does to you

Almost every product in this market prices one of four ways, and the model matters more than the headline rate because it decides how the bill behaves as you grow.

1. Per user, per month. The most common. Simple to compare and it scales with headcount, which sounds fair until you notice it also scales with the number of people you would like to have looking at the system.
2. Tiered by user bands. Same idea with steps. Watch the step edges: adding one person can move you a whole band, and the effective cost per user jumps at exactly the point you were not planning for it.
3. Per project or per active job. Fits businesses with a few large projects and punishes those with many small ones. Ask specifically what counts as active and when a job stops being counted, because a finished job that stays billable for a year is a common and unpleasant surprise.
4. Flat fee for the organisation. One figure, sized to the firm rather than to headcount. Predictable, and it removes the incentive to limit who logs in. Vendors on this model rarely publish the figure, which is a separate question worth understanding before you read it as evasion.

Where the rest of the money is

Four costs that are real, that are frequently not in the quoted figure, and that a buyer should ask about explicitly.

• Implementation or onboarding. Sometimes a one-off fee, sometimes a mandatory professional services package. It can be a substantial fraction of the first year and it is not always mentioned until the contract stage.
• Data migration. Getting your existing jobs, subcontractors, assets and history into the system. Ask whether it is included, what exactly is migrated, and what happens to the things that are not. "You can start fresh" is a real answer, but it is a cost in disguise, because somebody will be looking things up in the old system for two years.
• Your own people's time. The cost nobody puts in the business case and the largest one in most implementations. A fortnight of a contracts manager's attention has a value, and it is spent whether or not it appears on an invoice.
• The annual uplift. Read the renewal clause. An uplift of inflation plus a few per cent, compounding, changes the three year figure considerably, and a contract that permits unilateral repricing at renewal is worth negotiating at signature rather than discovering later.

Whether you can find a price at all

Before any of that, there is a simpler question: can you find a figure without talking to anybody? Often you cannot, and the reason is usually the pricing model rather than evasion.

A vendor charging by the seat can publish a number easily, because the number is the whole model. Rate times people, and the arithmetic is the same for every buyer. A vendor charging by the shape of the business cannot, because there is no single number to publish. Neither approach is dishonest on its own. What it tells you is what the answer is going to depend on, which is worth knowing before you ask.

It also means a published rate and a quoted one are not comparable as they stand. Put both through the same five headings above, over the same three years, before deciding which is cheaper. Our own reasoning, and the argument against it, is set out in why there is no price list.

Why per-user pricing changes behaviour

This deserves its own section because it is the effect buyers least anticipate and it is not really about money.

When every login has a price, somebody in the business becomes responsible for deciding who does not get one. That decision is always made the same way: the office gets licences, and site does not, or the four people who use it constantly get licences and the eleven who would use it occasionally do not.

What follows is predictable. The people without access carry on with paper or WhatsApp, and somebody with a licence retypes their information into the system. The system now holds a version of what happened, entered by somebody who was not there, a day or two late. Every report drawn from it inherits that delay and that distance from the work.

The cost of the rationed licences was never the licence fee. It was that the data stopped being a record of the job and became a summary of the job, and the summary is what you then run the business on.

A firm that rations logins to control a bill ends up paying one person to retype everybody else's work. That is a more expensive way to save money than it looks.

What to ask any vendor, including us

Seven questions. They are short, they are all answerable in a sentence, and the ones a vendor is reluctant to answer plainly tell you as much as the answers.

1. What is the total first-year cost, including setup, migration and training?
2. What is the renewal price in years two and three, and what governs the uplift?
3. Does the price change if we put everybody on it, including site?
4. What exactly is migrated from our current system, and what is not?
5. How long until we are actually using it, not until the account is created?
6. If we leave, what do we get back, in what format, and how quickly?
7. What does it not do that we will still be doing in a spreadsheet?

That last one is the most useful question in any software demo, and a vendor who cannot answer it either does not know their product or is not going to tell you.

Whether it is worth it at all

Set against the licence, the comparison is not the software's cost against zero. It is the software's cost against what the current arrangement is already costing, which is usually invisible because it is spread across people's time and the odd bad month.

The honest components: hours spent assembling a position that a system would produce, applications that went in late or unsupported and were paid short, retention that was never chased because nobody held the date, plant hired twice because nobody could find the first one, and the cost of a claim you could not evidence. Most firms can put a number on at least two of those from last year without much effort. If that number is smaller than the annual licence, the answer is genuinely no, and a vendor telling you otherwise is selling rather than advising.

Where to start, on Monday

Before you look at a single product, write down two numbers: how many people would touch the system if licences were free, and what last year's avoidable losses came to across late applications, uncollected retention and lost plant. The first tells you which pricing model suits you. The second tells you what you can sensibly spend.

Then take the seven questions above into every demo and write the answers down. Vendors sound remarkably similar in a demo and remarkably different on that list.