Own it instead of renting it
You can own the software instead of paying for it forever.
Most businesses run on per-seat subscriptions because that was the only sensible option when they started, and for plenty of them it still is. But when the fees have grown every year, the fit has not improved, and there are spreadsheets holding the gaps together, a system of your own can cost less and do more.
How you got here
The subscription was the right call. Then the business changed.
Nobody starts by commissioning software. You pick the product everyone in your trade uses, it covers most of what you need, and it costs less than a developer. That is the correct decision and we would have made it too.
What changes is everything around it. You hire, so the bill grows — the fee scales with your headcount rather than with the value you get from it. The price rises each year for features you did not ask for. And the way you actually work drifts away from the way the product assumes you work, so people build the difference by hand: the spreadsheet beside the system, the shared document that is the real source of truth, the step everyone knows to do that the software has never heard of.
Those workarounds are the signal. They are the shape of the system you actually need, and you are already paying to maintain them in people's time.
The arithmetic
Put your own numbers in.
A subscription is a cost that recurs and rises. A system of your own is a build plus what it takes to keep running. Whichever is cheaper depends entirely on your figures, so here they are rather than ours — and at a handful of seats the subscription usually wins, which the numbers below will tell you plainly if that is you.
Your numbers
These start on example figures so the chart is not an empty box. They are not our prices — the build number in particular is a placeholder, because nobody can quote your work without scoping it first.
Five years of subscription
$112,794
Five years of owning it
$58,000
You pass the cost of owning it in month 29 — about 2.4 years. After that the subscription is money you would have stopped spending.
When not to
Four reasons to stay exactly where you are.
This is the part a page like this usually leaves out. If one of these is you, the subscription is doing its job and replacing it would be us taking your money.
Your process really is standard
If the product's way of working is also yours, you are getting a great deal. Software built for thousands of businesses is cheaper than software built for one.
You are still changing shape
A business that will look different in a year should rent. Build when the way you work has settled enough to be worth writing down.
The fee is small against the work
A few hundred a month against a business doing millions is not where your money is going. We would rather tell you that than take the project.
Nobody inside will own it
A system of your own needs someone to answer to, even with us maintaining it. Without that person it drifts, and a subscription is the better home for it.
What we have replaced
Two of these, so far.
Client names are not published, but the products are not ours to protect. Both were field service businesses, and both had the same thing wrong.
A field service business on Jobber
Scheduling, quoting and invoicing for crews in the field. The subscription did the common 80% and nothing of the part that made the business different, which lived in spreadsheets beside it.
A contractor on ServiceBox
Same shape of problem: the product covered the standard workflow, and everything specific to how they actually quote and cost a job had been worked around rather than supported.
What stayed the same
- The jobs, quotes and invoices the product already handled
- The accounting package, synced rather than replaced
- Everything the crews already knew how to do
What the product could not do
- The costing that had been living in a spreadsheet
- The quoting steps specific to how they actually price
- Reporting that answered their questions, not the product's
- No per-seat fee the next time they hire
Tell us what you are paying for.
Which product, how many seats, and the thing it will not do. You get an honest read on whether replacing it is worth it — including when the answer is that it is not.