For a service-call shop, maintenance agreements are the most valuable thing on the books and the feature most likely to be shallow in the product you pick.
Why this is the deciding feature for service shops
A shop with 600 maintenance agreements has a predictable revenue base, a reason to be in the customer’s home twice a year, and a replacement pipeline. The agreements are the asset. The software’s job is to make sure every one of them gets visited, renewed and billed, without anyone remembering to do it.
That is a harder problem than it looks: it means generating visits from a contract on a schedule, tracking which are done, chasing the unscheduled ones before the term expires, handling renewals and price increases, and holding the whole thing against a customer record that survives an equipment change.
The questions that separate real support from a checkbox
Can a contract generate its own visits automatically for a whole year, or does someone schedule them?
What happens to unused visits at renewal — carried, lapsed, refunded?
Can you raise prices across a segment of agreements at renewal without touching each one?
Does the agreement follow the property or the customer when a house is sold?
Can you see, on one screen, which agreements have a visit due in the next thirty days and no appointment booked?
The last one is the one that shows up in revenue. It is also the one most likely to be missing.
Tier placement
Recurring-work and service-agreement capability tends to sit above the entry tier. That is a general pattern in SMB field service pricing and it is worth verifying against the current tier tables before assuming the cheapest plan will do — because if agreements are your revenue base, the tier that supports them properly is your real price, not the entry tier that gets advertised.
Jobber’s published tiers run USD 49, USD 139, USD 199-499 and USD 499-699 monthly. Housecall Pro’s run USD 79, USD 189 and USD 329 monthly. Which tier carries which recurring-work capability is a feature-matrix question that changes between releases; read it on the vendor’s current page rather than from any comparison, including this one.
Sources
- Jobber — primary vendor pricing page, read
- Housecall Pro — primary vendor pricing page, read
Vendor pricing changes without notice. Every figure above carries the date it was read. If a vendor’s current page disagrees with this one, the vendor’s page is right and this one is stale — and that is a bug worth reporting.
