Am I Locked Into a Contract? How Repair Shop Software Pricing Actually Works

Every shop owner who has been burned once asks the same question before the second time, and they usually ask it last, quietly, after they have already decided they like the product:

"If this doesn't work out, how hard is it to get out?"

It is the right question and it is asked too late. The answer is usually sitting on the pricing page you already read, in a piece of small print you skimmed past because it was next to a number you liked.

The two prices problem

Here is the thing nobody says plainly: most repair and field service software publishes two prices for the same plan. One if you pay monthly. A lower one if you commit to a year.

Guess which one goes on the pricing page in the big font.

Guess which one gets quoted in every comparison article, including the ones written by people who have never opened the product.

Of the thirteen competitors we track prices for, six publish a rate that is cheaper on annual billing than paying month to month. Some of the gaps are not small:

Look at the top row. Jobber's Core plan is $49 a month if you pay monthly and $24 a month on annual billing. That is not a rounding difference. The advertised price is less than half the month to month price, and the difference is a year of your money sitting with somebody else.

I am not calling that dishonest. An annual discount is a completely normal thing to offer, and if you are certain about a product then taking it is a genuinely good deal. Every number in that table is published by the vendor on their own site, and it is on us to read it properly.

What I am saying is this: when you compare two products and one looks dramatically cheaper, check whether you are comparing a monthly price to an annual one. We got this wrong on our own site earlier this month, printing another vendor's annual rate as though it were their monthly rate, in our favour. It was wrong and we fixed it. It is an easy mistake to make and it is a very easy mistake to be handed.

The seven other products we track do not publish an annual rate we have been able to verify. That is not the same as saying they do not have one. It means we have not read it, and we are not going to make one up for them.

Three questions worth asking before the card comes out

Do not ask "is there a contract". You will get "no contracts!" from almost everybody, and it is almost always technically true and occasionally useless. Ask these instead.

1. If I pay for a year and leave in month three, what happens to the other nine months?

This is the real question the word "contract" was standing in for. Some vendors will refund the unused portion. Some will let you run out the term. Some do neither. There is no industry norm here, and the answer is rarely on the pricing page.

2. Can I cancel from inside the product, or do I have to talk to somebody?

This one tells you more than the price does. A cancel button in the settings is a company that expects you to stay because the product is good. A phone number, a retention specialist, and a thirty day written notice requirement is a company that has budgeted for you wanting to leave.

3. On the day I cancel, what happens to my data?

Ask whether your jobs, customers and invoices are still there, whether you can still read them, and whether you can get them out as a file. Ask it in writing, before you sign up, when you are still just a prospect they want to impress.

What it looks like here, specifically

I am not going to write three hundred words about our philosophy of trust. Here is the mechanism.

Every plan is month to month. Solo is $15/mo, Team is $49/mo, Pro is $99/mo. There is no other price. We do advertise an annual discount, and I should be straight about the state of it: you cannot click a button and buy it. You have to email us and we set it up by hand, because we never built the checkout for it. Our pricing page now says exactly that instead of quoting a rate you cannot actually purchase.

Cancelling is one button. Settings, then Billing, then Cancel Subscription. The shop owner can press it without talking to anyone. There is no notice period and nothing to write.

You keep the rest of the month you paid for. Cancelling schedules the subscription to end when your current billing period does. It does not switch anything off that afternoon. If you change your mind before then, there is a Reactivate button in the same place, and pressing it undoes the whole thing.

Your account does not get deleted. When the period ends the shop drops to the Free plan. Every job, every customer, every invoice, every technician login is still there. There is no job cap, no customer cap, no invoice cap and no seat cap on any plan we sell, Free included, so nothing gets locked behind a limit on the way down. What you lose are the two things the paid plan actually gated: SMS notifications to your customers, and the reports and business insights section.

Export before you go, not after. The reports section has CSV exports for jobs, customers, invoices and line items. Download the four files while your paid plan is still running, the same way you would grab anything else you care about before a subscription ends. It takes about a minute and it means the question "can I get my data out" is answered before you need the answer.

The uncomfortable part

We have exactly one shop paying us right now, and their first renewal charged this morning. Nobody has ever cancelled a TechsBox subscription, which means I can tell you precisely what the code does and I cannot tell you a story about how gracefully we handled somebody leaving. I would rather say that than imply a track record we have not earned yet.

So do not take my word for the mechanism. Go and look at it. Sign up for the free plan, open Settings, find Billing, and see for yourself what the page offers before you ever put a card in. That takes five minutes and it is worth more than any paragraph I could write here.

And do the same thing with whoever you are comparing us to. Log into their trial, find the cancellation flow, and see how long it takes you. The product that makes that easy to find is telling you something true about itself.

The short version

• Two prices for one plan is normal. Check which one you are being quoted.
• Six of the thirteen products we track publish a cheaper annual rate. One of them is less than half the monthly price.
• "No contracts" is a slogan. "Here is the cancel button" is a fact.
• Get your customer list out as a file while you are still a paying customer, not after.
• If a company makes leaving hard, they have told you what they think of the product.