A Three-Person Bristol Plumbing Shop Pays $5,899 a Year in Software. Here Is Every Line Item.

Search "how much does plumbing software cost" and you will get thirty pages of "contact us for pricing." That is not an accident. Vendors would rather quote you than let you compare.

So on 14 August 2026 I sat down and priced the entire stack a small residential plumbing shop in Bristol actually runs, from the vendors' own published pages. Every number below came off a page I loaded that day. Where a vendor publishes nothing, I say so rather than guess.

The shop we are pricing#

Three people. The owner, who is on the truck. One more licensed tech. One person doing phones and invoicing part-time from the office. Two trucks. Residential service and repair around Bristol, Warren and Barrington, with the occasional run over the Mount Hope Bridge.

That shop is not a startup and it is not a franchise. It is the most common shape of plumbing business in the East Bay, and it is the one nobody writes pricing articles for.

Before the arithmetic: a shop like that is usually running fifteen-year-old customer relationships, a phone that rings at 11pm on a Sunday, and a reputation built one flooded basement at a time. The point of this article is not that you are doing it wrong. The point is that you are being charged list price for things that have a lower price sitting right next to them.

The line items#

Everything below is list price, USD, exclusive of sales tax, read from the vendor's own pricing page on 14 August 2026. Where a plan has a cheaper annual rate, I used the annual rate, because that is the honest floor and because I am about to argue you should be on it.

That is the bill before you have spent one dollar getting the phone to ring.

The two numbers that surprise people#

Jobber is the biggest single line, and the jump is not where you think it is. Jobber's Core tier is $29 a month billed annually, which sounds wonderful right up until you read the fine print: Core is one user only, and QuickBooks Online sync does not appear until the Connect tier. A three-person shop that wants its techs to see the schedule and its invoices to land in accounting is on Connect, and Connect with 5 users is $149 a month annually, $199 month-to-month. Jobber's own page is explicit that extra users beyond your bundle are $29/mo each.

QuickBooks quietly got more expensive twelve days ago. Intuit's own product-update page states that "the monthly subscription prices for QuickBooks Online Essentials, Plus, and Advanced will change for renewals on or after August 1, 2026," and that "Pricing for QuickBooks Free, Lite, Ledger, and Simple Start remains unchanged." Essentials now lists at $85. Any figure you find in a blog post written before this month is stale.

What I could not price, and why that matters#

I am not going to invent numbers to make a tidier table.

• ServiceTitan publishes nothing. All three packages, Starter, Essentials and The Works, carry a "Request Pricing" button and no dollar figure. Their page says only that "our per-technician pricing is designed to fit your business and goals, at any size." If you see a ServiceTitan price quoted in an article, that writer did not get it from ServiceTitan.
• Housecall Pro's team pricing is not published. Their individual rates render fine: Basic $59, Essentials $149, Max $299 a month billed annually. But the multi-user "Teams" column on their pricing page loaded as literal $XX/mo placeholders, and no per-extra-user figure appears anywhere on their site. The $35-a-seat number circulating on comparison blogs is not measured and I will not repeat it as fact.
• Podium publishes no prices at all. Both their pricing page and their home-services page say "get a custom quote."
• Intuit contradicts itself on payroll. Their standalone payroll page says $50/mo plus $7 per employee. Their bundle page, same site, same day, says $6.50 per employee. I used $7 because it is the higher of the two and I would rather over-budget you. Confirm at checkout.

That is four vendors out of roughly a dozen that will not tell you the price before they get you on a call. Notice which four.

Then there is advertising, which is a different animal#

Google Ads has no platform fee. Google's own support documentation is clear that "you pay only for the actual clicks and calls that your ad receives." What it costs is entirely a function of what a click costs, and plumbing clicks are not cheap.

Sit with the middle number. At $129 a lead, if you close one in three, a booked job costs roughly $387 in ad spend before you have bought a single fitting. For a $250 drain clear that is a loss. For a water heater replacement it is fine. Ads are a tool for your high-ticket work, not your service calls. If you are running them undifferentiated across everything, that is where your money is going.

The part where a real agency shows its own invoice#

The reason this article exists is that almost nobody in this industry will show you their actual numbers. Joy Hawkins, who owns the local SEO agency Sterling Sky, is one of the few who has:

She then itemises it. Asana at $762 a month, Ahrefs at $4,500 a year, Google Workspace at $7,200 a year, all under a section she titles "Tools (The 'Invisible' Budget Sucker)." That is an agency stack, not a plumber's, and I am not suggesting your bill looks anything like $93,000. What I am borrowing is the device: the itemised receipt. She could name every line. Most business owners I meet cannot name half of theirs.

That is the actual finding of this article. Not that $5,899 is too much. It might be exactly right. The problem is that almost nobody I sit down with in Bristol or Fall River can tell me what that number is for their own shop without going and getting a bank statement.

The fix you can do yourself today, for free#

Thirty minutes, no purchase, no consultant.

1. Pull your last three months of bank and card statements and highlight every recurring software charge. All of them. The ones you forgot are the point of the exercise. Almost every shop I do this with finds at least one dead subscription: a scheduling tool from 2023, a second website builder, a review platform somebody signed up for at a trade show.

2. On everything you are definitely keeping, switch from monthly to annual billing. This is the free money. Jobber Connect at 5 users is $199 a month with no commitment and $149 billed annually, and Jobber's own page advertises "save up to 25% with annual billing." That single switch is $600 a year on one line item. Quo runs $33 a user monthly versus $23 annually, which on three users is another $360. Google Workspace Business Starter is $8.40 flexible versus $84 a year fixed-term, which works out to $7 a month.

You are already paying for these. You are just paying a convenience premium for the right to cancel next month on a tool you have used for four years and will use for four more.

3. Cancel one thing. Not the cheapest one. The one you have not opened in sixty days.

Where the leaner floor actually is#

If you wanted to run genuinely lean and were honest about the trade-offs, here is the floor. I want to be clear about what you give up, because the cheap column always costs something.

The single-user constraint on Jobber Core is the real wall, and for a three-person shop it is a wall you will hit inside a month. But $1,615 against $5,899 is the honest span, and knowing where you sit inside it is worth more than any tool on either list.

One thing I will flag. Vercel's free Hobby tier is restricted by their own fair-use guidelines to non-commercial personal use, so a business site hosted there means the $20/mo Pro plan. Netlify's free tier carries no such restriction. If somebody set your site up on Vercel Hobby, that is a compliance problem waiting to happen, not a bargain.

What this looks like on Monday#

Open your bank statement. Write the list. Total it. If the number surprises you, that is the finding, and it is a finding you got for free, which is more than most of this industry will give you.

If you want a second set of eyes on the list, or you want to know whether the money is going anywhere useful, I am in Fall River and I answer my own phone.

774.559.8992 · Joshua.Amado@AvalonPartner.com

Every price in this article was read from the vendor's own published pricing page on 14 August 2026 and is list price in USD, exclusive of sales tax. Prices change. Where a vendor does not publish a price, this article says so rather than estimating one. The Fall River plumbing figures referenced in our other work come from a measured audit of 16 businesses run on 13 July 2026; the businesses in that sample are anonymised and were not contacted.