Most trials are spent clicking through features and end with no more information than the demo. Here is a fourteen-day plan that produces an answer.
Start on day one
Housecall Pro publishes 14 days free with no credit card required. The single biggest determinant of whether that window is useful is whether you start on the day you sign up.
A trial begun on day nine is a demo with a countdown.
The plan
Days 1-2. Load twenty real customers and this week’s real jobs. No sample data.
Days 3-7. Dispatch entirely from the software for one crew, while the rest of the shop runs normally. One crew is enough and limits the damage.
Days 8-10. Invoice and collect on site for that crew. This is the part that tests the customer’s experience, which you cannot evaluate from inside the product.
Days 11-12. Break it deliberately. Pull a technician. Reschedule a customer twice. Void an invoice. Issue a refund. Watch what the office has to do.
Days 13-14. Ask the crew, individually and in private, whether they want to keep it. Then export everything you put in and see what comes out.
The exit test
That last step is the one nobody does and the one that matters most: before the trial ends, export your own data and open the file.
You will never again be in a position to test the exit at zero cost. If the export is poor, you have learned the price of leaving before you have paid the price of arriving.
What to write down
Clicks to close a typical job. Minutes to rebuild the schedule after one technician drops out. Number of customer phone calls the crew still had to make. Whether the invoice was paid on site. What the export contained.
Five numbers beat fifty impressions, and they are comparable across two trials.
Sources
- 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.
