Swivl · cost of the stack
What are you paying to run a trade business?
Most contractors pay four separate bills to do what one system should do. Adjust anything below — the numbers are yours to argue with.
Your setup
3 including you
1 admin, dispatch
20% of inbound
5 across 1 office person
3 on the phone
What you pay now
Every bill you are already paying
- JobberCore — 4 users, office and field$136
- Answering serviceYou said you don't pay for one—
- No tracking on 3 trucksEstimate8% of fuel burned on idling and detours, plus 10 minutes a day per tech you cannot verify$627
- Website hosting & upkeepHosting, domain, updates, edits$150
- Ad & social managementNobody running your ads — we are not going to guess what that costs you—
- Crew time trackingYou said you don't pay for one—
- Bought leadsYou said you don't buy leads—
- Jobs lost to missed callsEstimate21 missed → 4.8 jobs at $450$2,150
- Jobs lost to slow estimatesEstimateAbout 19 written quotes a month — two points of close rate on the 80% you'd build in Swivl is 0.30 more jobs, at your $450 blended ticket$137
- Hours lost to admin and double entryEstimate2.0 hours a week back across the business — 8.7 hours a month at $50$433
- Waiting 30 days to get paidEstimate$24,570 invoiced a month sitting 25 days longer than it needs to, at 10%$168
- Margin lost to stale material pricesEstimate3% of materials across 55 jobs a month$258
What you’d pay on Swivl
One system, metered on usage
- The software itselfCustomers, jobs, scheduling, invoicing, unlimited users$0
- Entered once, not three timesJob, invoice, customer and schedule are the same record$0
- AI receptionist21 missed calls × 3 min × 10 credits630 cr
- Estimates, built in minutes80% of your 19 quotes × 60 credits — minutes, not an evening914 cr
- Texts to customers4 per job × 55 jobs — email is free218 cr
- GPS trackingNot switched on—
- Website200 credits to build, spread over a year17 cr
- Ads and creativeBuild and target campaigns free — you still fund the ad spend itself$0
- Leads that are yours aloneYour site and your phone, not a lead resold to five contractors$0
- Clock in and out on the jobHours against the job they were worked on, no separate app$0
- Paid on the doorstepCard, tap-to-pay or a link before you leave$0
- Knowing which jobs made moneyCosts, labour and margin on every job, as it happens$0
$49 for Growth plus $9 of top-up credits at $0.0327 each — the same rate as the credits inside your plan. Every tier up is cheaper per credit on both, so we priced all four and this was the cheapest.
What you stop paying
$2,735
a year off bills you already pay, after $58 a month on Growth
$286a month is money already leaving your account — find it on this month’s bills. Swivl replaces it for $58 a month on Growth. The $3,773 of work you are not currently winning, which is an estimate however hard we damp it — it is the part to argue with, and the figure above leaves it out.
No card. Unlimited users. Nothing expires.
Show your working
Where these numbers come from
Every figure below is a published benchmark, not a number we invented. Some are marked as our own estimates because we could not find a credible public source — treat those with more suspicion than the rest.
Average job value — trade
$450 — our starting point
You picked a trade we don't have a benchmark for, so this is a middle-of-the-road figure across the trades we do — $450. It is the least reliable number on the page and the one you should change first. Type your own average job value above and everything below recalculates.
Jobber
$49/mo and up
Core, billed monthly. Extra users $29 each on every plan — Jobber counts anyone who touches the account, office or field.
getjobber.com/pricingAnswering service
$250/mo
A live answering service runs $200–450 a month for 50–100 minutes, with $1.50–2.50 per minute beyond that. Ruby is around $329, PATLive around $199. We use $250.
OnCallClerk 2026 pricing breakdownGPS fleet tracking
$30 per vehicle/mo
GPS tracking runs $15–50 per vehicle per month, with mid-range plans at $25–45. We use $30, and assume one vehicle per person on the tools.
GPS Insight pricing guideWebsite hosting & upkeep
$150/mo
Small-business site maintenance runs $50–500 a month covering hosting, domain, updates, security and content edits. We use $150 — nearer the bottom than the middle.
UENI, citing GoDaddy's 2026 guideCalls you miss
20% of inbound
Home-service contractors miss roughly 20–30% of inbound calls, rising to 40–50% at seasonal peaks. We default to 20% — the bottom of that range.
CallRail and Invoca industry reportingWhat Swivl actually costs
$0 to $299/mo, on usage
Run out of credits and you buy more rather than being cut off, so the figure above is the plan plus any top-ups — we price every tier that way and show you the cheapest. Extra credits cost the same as the ones inside your plan, and every tier up is cheaper per credit on both — $0.033 on Growth, $0.031 on Scale Pro, $0.025 on Organization. Upgrading pays for itself; you are never penalised for going over. We assume 80% of the quotes you write go through the estimator once you have it, and none of them today. Swivl meters estimates, calls, texts, GPS and storage as credits: 10 a minute for the receptionist, 60 an estimate, 200 to build a website, 1 a text, 5 per tech per hour of GPS. Email costs nothing. Starter includes 250 credits, Growth 1,500, Scale Pro 4,800, Organization 12,000. Users are unlimited on every plan — you move tiers on usage, never on headcount.
swivl.tech/pricingRunning without GPS
8% of fuel, 10 min a day per tech
Fleet tracking cuts fuel 8–12% through idling and routing (GPS Insight); Verizon Connect claims 10–15% and Teletrac Navman claims 10–20% productivity. We use 8% — the bottom of the most conservative source — and only ten minutes a day per technician of unverifiable time. Every one of those studies comes from a company selling tracking, so we took the smallest number any of them would admit to and cut it again. If it still reads high, turn the toggle on and the line disappears.
GPS Insight pricing and ROI guideHours lost to admin and paperwork
4–15 a week each, we start at 10
These are hours for the whole business, not one person — everyone who touches paperwork, the owner included. Sage research found small business owners lose about two days a month to financial admin, and roughly half spend four hours a week just chasing payments. We start at 10 hours per office person on paper and spreadsheets, 5 if you already run software, floored at one person because in a small shop the owner does it at night. We assume an all-in-one gives back 40% and value an hour at $50 — well under the $75 billable rate the same sources quote. The 40% is our own estimate, and the hours only become money if they go back into billable work or save you a hire.
Sage, the hidden admin burden on small businessesCrew time tracking
$40/mo + about $8 a seat
ClockShark's Standard plan is $40 a month flat per Capterra, plus a per-seat charge they will not publish — you have to call them. The $8 a seat is our own estimate and the least verified figure on this page. Swivl clocks crews in and out against the job itself, so the hours land on the job costing rather than in a separate app you reconcile later.
Capterra, ClockShark pricingWaiting to get paid
25 days, financed at 10%
This is the cost of waiting, not of bad debt. Taking payment on the doorstep instead of thirty days later frees a month of invoiced work, and we value that at a 10% cost of capital — roughly a small business line of credit. We do not claim you collect invoices you would otherwise lose. That would be a far bigger number and a far weaker one.
Swivl estimate, not a benchmarkBought leads
$35–$100 each, sold 3–8 times
Angi charges roughly $40–$85 a lead for plumbing and $45–$100 for HVAC, on top of about $300 a year in membership, with 12-month contracts and 30–35% cancellation penalties. The same lead goes to three to eight contractors at once — at five, that is a one-in-five shot before anyone has even called back. A lead that arrives through your own website or your own phone is not shared with anybody.
LeadTruffle, Angi Leads pricing 2026Ad and social management
$500/mo
Social media management runs $500–$5,000 a month, with smaller operations mostly in the $100–$1,000 band. We use $500. This is the agency fee only. Swivl makes building and targeting campaigns free, but it does not buy your ads — the media spend is still yours and is not counted as a saving anywhere on this page.
WebFX social media pricingIf you already pay someone to answer
They catch 75% of it
An answering service is not free but it does work: we assume it catches three-quarters of the calls that would otherwise ring out, so your lost revenue line shrinks and your saving becomes the invoice you stop paying instead. The 75% is our own estimate — base plans cover 50–100 minutes and overflow still escapes.
Swivl estimate, not a benchmarkCalls a month
30–45 per field employee, by trade
The starting call volume scales with your crew and your trade — 45 a month per person for HVAC down to 12 for remodeling, where the jobs are far bigger and far rarer. That is our own estimate, not a benchmark — it exists so the tool stays sensible as you move the headcount slider. Type your own number over it and we will leave it alone.
Swivl estimate, not a benchmarkHow many jobs get a written quote
15% of them
Replacements and installs are 10–20% of jobs by count but 50–70% of revenue. A service call is diagnosed and completed on the spot — it never becomes a quote. We use 15%, and we value the extra wins at your blended ticket rather than the far larger replacement ticket, which understates this line on purpose.
Built on Tenth, HVAC ticket size by job typeClose rate on quotes
43% today, +2 points with Swivl
The ACCA Contractor of the Future study of 1,000+ contractors puts the average close rate at 43% (45% residential, 38% commercial). The two-point lift from quoting on site rather than days later is our own estimate — no published study quantifies it, so we kept it small.
ACCA Contractor of the Future studyMargin lost to stale prices
3% of materials
Materials at 35% of ticket, of which 3% is lost to pricing a job off last season's numbers. Both figures are our own estimates — we found no published benchmark. Treat this as the softest line on the page.
Swivl estimate, not a benchmarkWork you could actually take
4 extra jobs per person, per month
Recovered work is capped at roughly one extra job per person per week. Answering a call is not the same as having the capacity to do the job, and a calculator that ignores that produces numbers no contractor believes.
Swivl's own constraint, not a benchmarkCalls that become jobs
65%, then cut by two-thirds
About 65% of answered calls book. We then multiply by 0.35, assuming Swivl's AI receptionist converts far worse than a good human would. That is deliberately pessimistic: it is the difference between a number you believe and one you don't.
Service Roundtable booking benchmarksEstimates only, based on published industry benchmarks and your own inputs. Your actual costs will differ. Competitor pricing is as published on their own sites and changes without notice — last checked 30 August 2026.
Common questions
- How much does field service software cost?
- Entry tiers run from about $49/month (Jobber) to $79/month (Housecall Pro), and ServiceTitan is reported at roughly $245/month per technician on custom quotes only. Almost all of them price per user, so the figure moves every time you hire. The bigger number is usually what sits around the software: an answering service, GPS tracking, a website, and bought leads are separate bills on top. Swivl's Starter plan is $0/month with unlimited users, and the calculator on this page totals both sides.
- Where do these numbers come from?
- Competitor pricing is taken from each vendor's own published rates and linked in the "Where these numbers come from" section below the result. Industry benchmarks are cited the same way. Anything we could not source publicly is our own estimate, flagged in gold so you can discount it. Change any input and everything recalculates.
- Is the headline figure money I actually pay today?
- Yes — the headline is the hard column only: bills already leaving your account, net of what Swivl would cost. Opportunity costs like jobs lost to missed calls or slow estimates are shown separately and labelled as estimates, because they are real but not something you can find on a statement.
- Do I need an account to use this?
- No. Nothing here asks for an email address or a card, and no result is saved or sent anywhere.