Month to month estimating software for contractors

Why this phrase and not best estimating software

The modifier tells the whole story. A man searching for the best estimating software is shopping. A man searching month to month has already been burned once and is reading the terms before the feature list.

Search it and you get filter pages. Capterra on four separate URLs, a couple of software directories, a buyer guide, a listing or two. Products with a monthly figure in a column. Not one of them tells you the thing you actually want to know, which is the point at which monthly billing stops being monthly.

So here is that first, before anything about us. It applies to every vendor on this page one, including the ones you are about to go and look at.

Where month to month quietly stops being true

Monthly billing is not the same thing as no commitment. There are four places the difference shows up and all four live in the terms rather than on the pricing page.

Setup and onboarding fees. A product can be ninety nine a month and charge twelve hundred to import your price book. You are not locked in, but you are not leaving in month two either, which comes to the same thing.

Your data on the way out. Ask what you can export and in what format. If your cost book and your past estimates leave as a PDF, they did not really leave.

Seat minimums. Billed monthly, five seats minimum, and you have three guys. You are paying every month for two people who do not exist.

And the annual discount that is really a monthly penalty. Some pricing is built so that paying monthly hurts, rather than paying annually being a deal. Judge the monthly figure against what the product is worth to you, not against the annual one sitting next to it.

• Setup or onboarding fees
• What your data looks like on the way out
• Seat minimums above your actual crew size
• Whether the monthly rate is a real option or a deterrent

What we charge

Two scans free to start, with no card.

After that there are three plans, billed monthly unless you choose otherwise. Yearly is two months free if you ever want it, and nothing about the monthly option is built to punish you for taking it.

What is metered and what is not

Extra scans past your allowance are four dollars each. Nothing locks and nothing stops working when you reach the number, and there is no upgrade wall in the middle of a job.

A job one of your own people captures on site is not metered at all, on any plan. The scan count is for the ones a homeowner does from a link you send. That is what the seats are for.

Founding pricing is locked for as long as the account stays active. Those are the numbers as they stand today.

What this is not, so you do not waste a trial

Two things said plainly, because a trial you abandon in week one is worse for both of us than a no today.

This is not free estimating software. If free is the requirement, there are products that are free and you should go and use one.

This is not a full estimating suite and it is not job management. No scheduling, no invoicing, no change orders, no crew timesheets, no client portal. If that is the hole in your business then you are shopping for something like Buildertrend or Contractor Foreman, and you should.

What this does is one step. The homeowner captures her own room from a link you send. A vision model reads the photographs and writes the scope brief. The price is arithmetic against your own cost book, line by line, with every quantity traceable to where it came from. That step, done without a truck.