Tick what you pay for, put in your crew size and how many jobs you run a month, and the bill adds itself up. Then it shows the year a one-off build would have cost less than the renewals.
Every price here comes from the price index, checked July 2026, in NZD plus GST. Nothing is sent anywhere.
Only the tools priced that way use each number. Per-seat tools use the first, ServiceM8 uses the second.
Xero, your phone system, storage, the second app you bought because the first one couldn't schedule. I don't publish verified NZ prices for those, so put your own number in rather than trust one I made up.
Prefilled at the middle of my band for a job-tracking system that replaces a stack, $10,000 to $22,000 + GST. A single automation alongside your existing tools is far less.
Hosting and licences the build still needs. Often small, rarely nothing.
A $16,000 build plus its running costs would have cost less from year 5 onwards.
Prices as at July 2026, NZD, excluding GST, taken from the comparison posts on this site. Subscriptions are held flat, which flatters them: real ones rise. The build side assumes it keeps doing the job for the whole period without a rewrite, which flatters it.
Any tool that puts subscriptions next to a build is being sold by someone, and here it's me, so read the numbers knowing that.
The subscription side is held flat. No tool has held its price for five years. Add another person and the per-seat tools move the same day, which is the whole point of the crew-priced and job-priced ones. So the real five-year subscription figure is higher than the one above, probably by a fair margin.
The build side assumes nothing changes. It assumes the thing you build still fits in year four, that nobody has to be paid to change it, and that you still have someone who can. That is the assumption that fails most often, and it fails quietly. If your processes are still moving, the subscription is the right answer even when the maths says otherwise.
And the sticker price was never the real cost anyway. The expensive part is usually not the subscription, it's the hours going into the gaps between two tools that don't talk. That is a different sum, and the ROI calculator does it.
Everything in the picker is a number already published on this site and checked in July 2026, not a figure scraped from a vendor page today. The ServiceM8 job tiers and the crossover against per-seat pricing are worked through in what ServiceM8 actually costs once your crew grows. The four tools are set side by side in four tools handle most NZ tradies. NextMinute's crew banding against Tradify's per-seat model is in NextMinute or Tradify.
Ascora is missing on purpose. It bills per seat in AUD, so its New Zealand cost moves with the exchange rate on top of whatever Ascora charges, and I would rather leave it out than put a made-up conversion in a total you might budget against. It's covered in Ascora or NextMinute. Same reasoning for Xero and everything else: if I haven't verified the NZ price, it goes in the box you fill in yourself.
The usual reaction is to the total, and to the fact that two of the tools overlap by about half, not to any one tool looking expensive on its own. Before you go anywhere near a build, the cheaper move is to work out which of them you would actually miss. Most stacks have one tool nobody has opened in months and one that got bought to solve a problem that no longer exists.
If you're still choosing rather than trimming, every comparison is indexed here. If you're at the point of pricing a build against the renewals, what custom automation actually costs a Canterbury trades business is the honest version, and a Workflow Review is where you get an exact number instead of a band.
As at July 2026, in NZD plus GST: Tradify Lite is about $48 per user per month, Fergus starts around $53 a month for its base plan, NextMinute is NZ$199 a month covering a crew of three to nine, and ServiceM8 is priced by monthly job volume from $29 up to $349, then 20 cents a job above 1,500.
Not on day one. A build costs more upfront and cheaper over time, because the subscription bill repeats every year and grows with headcount while the build does not. Whether it pays depends on how many years you hold it and whether the process stays still long enough to be worth building around.
ServiceM8 charges on monthly job volume rather than headcount, so a small crew running a high number of short jobs can be pushed onto the $349 Premium Plus tier while a per-user tool would have charged for only a few seats. Past about eight staff the maths flips and ServiceM8 is usually the cheaper one.