You probably should
not build this
ServiceTitan, Jobber, Housecall Pro and CleanCloud are good products and most businesses should just use one. This page is about the cases where they do not fit, and how to tell which one you are in.
- Custom software vs off the shelf
- Housecall Pro alternative
- Jobber alternative
- ServiceTitan alternative
Which column is yours
If you recognise yourself on the left, close this page and go and buy one. That is the honest answer and it is free.
Buy the product
- Your jobs are priced from a list, or quoted once and not revised
- Your scheduling fits a calendar and a crew list
- You need it working this month, not next quarter
- Nobody on your side wants to own a system
- The subscription costs less than the time you would spend specifying a build
Building is worth it
- The price is only known after somebody measures, weighs or inspects something
- The product cannot represent how you actually assign work, so people keep a second list beside it
- You are paying per seat for people who use one screen
- The data you need out of it is the data it will not export
- You are running two or three products and retyping between them
Three situations a product genuinely cannot cover
Not because it is badly made. Because a product has to be the same shape for everybody.
Pricing that is decided later
Products want a price at booking. If yours depends on a weight, a measurement or an inspection, you end up authorising one amount and invoicing another, by hand, forever.
An assignment rule that is yours
Every product has an opinion about how work is assigned. When yours differs, the workaround is a spreadsheet beside the product, and now you have two systems and one of them is lying.
A customer flow you cannot change
Booking screens, emails and portals are where your business meets the customer. Products let you change the logo. If the flow itself is wrong for you, that is where you lose bookings and there is no setting for it.
What it costs, and what you take on
- What building costs
- More than a subscription in year one, and usually less by year three if the thing is actually used. Anyone who quotes without asking how you work is guessing.
- How long it takes
- The first working piece runs on your data early rather than at the end, so you can stop after it if it turns out you did not need the rest.
- What you get that a subscription never gives
- You own it. No per seat fee as you hire, no feature removed in an update, no export that mangles three years of history, and no price rise you have to absorb.
- What you take on
- Somebody has to be responsible for it. That is either a care arrangement or a person on your side, and pretending otherwise is how custom software gets a bad name.
The questions this decision turns on
Yes, and it happens often. If a product covers how you work, saying so costs nothing and keeps the door open for the day something stops fitting.
That is usually the sensible order. Run on the product, find out precisely which stage fails you, then build only that and connect it. It is cheaper and the requirements are real rather than imagined.
Export it first and look at it before committing to anything. What comes out of a product is sometimes much thinner than what you see in it, and that is worth discovering before a migration rather than during one.
Only if nobody decides which one holds the truth. One system owns each piece of data and the other reads it. Written down at the start, it is fine. Decided later, it is the mess people describe.
Tell me what the product will not do
If there is a setting for it, you will be told and you can go back to using what you already pay for. If there is not, that is the conversation worth having.