What field apps really cost a growing crew

You did the responsible thing. Before you signed up for a field app, you pulled up the pricing page, found the plan that fit your five guys, and wrote the monthly number on a sticky note. That is what the pricing page is for.

The problem is that the number on the pricing page is almost never the number you pay. It is the number for a crew that never grows, never needs the module the demo showed you, and onboards itself over a weekend. You are not that crew. You are hiring. And the way most field apps are priced, the bill does not grow in a straight line with your crew. It bends. There is usually one hire, often the sixth, where the price per head jumps and you do not see it coming. This guide is about finding that bend before it finds you.

If you are still deciding whether an app is worth it at all, start with what software is actually worth it for a five to ten man shop and the rest of the choosing software guides. This one assumes you have decided to buy and want the real total.

The five costs the pricing page leaves off

The monthly per-seat figure is real, but it is one line of five. Here is the rest of the bill, in the order it hits you.

Seats. This is the one in plain sight, the number you already saw. Ten dollars a head looks small until you multiply it by twelve people and twelve months. At least it is on the page.

The plan-tier jump. This is the one that bends the curve. Most apps put a feature you will need (scheduling, a second office login, custom job fields, GPS reporting) behind a higher tier, and gate the whole tier on it. You do not pay a little more for that one feature. You move every seat you have up to the pricier plan to turn it on. The trigger is often a head count: the starter plan caps at five users, and your sixth hire is what forces the jump.

Add-on modules. Job costing, a customer-facing booking page, review requests, a QuickBooks sync that actually works: these are frequently sold on top of the plan, each a monthly line of its own. None is huge alone. Three together can match your seat cost.

Onboarding hours. This one is not on any invoice, which is why it is easy to forget and often the biggest. Somebody, usually you, spends evenings importing customers, building templates, and teaching the crew. Those are real hours at your real rate. A day and a half of your time is a day and a half you did not bill.

The exit fee. Most of these apps quote the annual price because it is lower per month. But annual means you paid up front, and if the crew will not use it (a real risk, covered in my crew won’t use the app: how to pick one they will), you are out the rest of the year. The exit cost is not a wire transfer. It is the months you already bought and cannot get back.

Worked example one: the plan-tier jump at hire six

Take a real shape. You start on a well-known field service app at its starter tier, published at around forty-nine dollars a month, which covers up to five users. Five guys, call it fifty. On your sticky note that is what the app costs.

Then you hire your sixth. The starter tier caps at five. To add one person you move to the next tier up, published at around one hundred and forty-nine dollars a month, because that is the plan that allows a sixth seat. Your crew grew by twenty percent. Your bill grew by two hundred percent. The sixth guy did not cost you thirty dollars like the first five implied. He cost you a hundred.

Now add what the higher tier was really for. You wanted the scheduling and reporting that lives up there, so that is working as intended, but the job-costing you assumed was included is a separate add-on, another twenty-five a month. Call the running total one hundred seventy-five a month for six people. Over a year that is twenty-one hundred dollars, on a plan whose pricing page said forty-nine.

None of that is a scam. Every number is published. The pricing page just showed you the entrance and not the staircase.

Worked example two: per-seat priced right, still bending

Take a second real shape, a crew-coordination app priced simply per user, no big tier cliff, published around four dollars a user a month on its lower plan. For your growing crew of twelve that is forty-eight dollars a month. Clean. This is the good end of the market.

But the feature you actually bought the app for, the recurring job scheduling and the form templates your inspections need, sits on the higher plan at around six dollars a user. Twelve users at six is seventy-two a month. Still fair, still no cliff. The bend here is gentler, but watch what per-user does as you grow: every hire is another seat at full price, forever, whether that person logs in twice a day or twice a week. Your part-time weekend guy costs the same seat as your lead. That is the quiet tax per-seat pricing puts on hiring, and it is worth understanding before you sign. We walk through it in why per user pricing punishes you for hiring.

At twelve people, seventy-two a month is eight hundred and sixty-four a year, plus the onboarding evenings it cost you to build the templates. Cheaper than the first example, priced more fairly, and still four times what the crew of three would have paid, for the same work per person.

Run your own number

Do not trust anyone’s example, including this one. Run yours. Write down four things, then add them up.

• Seats today, and seats in a year. Do not lowball the year. If you are reading a growing-crew guide, you are hiring.
• The tier your must-have feature lives on. Find the one feature you will not live without, then find which plan it is on. Price every seat at that plan, not the starter plan. That is your real per-seat cost.
• The add-ons you will actually turn on. Job costing, a sync, a booking page. List only the ones you know you will use, and add their monthly lines.
• Onboarding, in your labor-hours. Guess the evenings on the high side and multiply by what your time is worth. It counts.

Add seats-at-real-tier, plus add-ons, times twelve months, plus onboarding. That number, not the sticky note, is what the app costs your growing crew. Compare it across two or three apps and the pricing pages stop hiding anything from you.

Where the bend disappears

Here is the contrast worth sitting with. Every example above bends because the price per head is not really per head. It is per head times a tier multiplier, plus modules, gated on a count you cross when you hire.

A flat model does not bend. One price a person, no tiers to jump, no head-count cap that forces a plan change, no module you buy to turn on the thing you came for. Hire number six costs exactly what hire number one did, and so does number twelve. The number you write on the sticky note the day you sign up is still the number per person the day you have a dozen people. There is nothing on the staircase because there is no staircase.

That is how Crewmigo is priced: one plan, one price a head, no per-job fees and no add-ons, and your subcontractor guests do not take a paid seat at all, so you pay for your own roster and nothing else. Each job runs as its own thread that remembers, the proof lands on the task when the work calls for it, and a job ends when the right person signs off by rank. We are new, so run one job on it and check the bill against the plan you almost signed. With flat pricing there is no bend to find later. The number you see is the number you pay, at five people and at twelve.