When owners hear “custom app” they picture consumer-app budgets, six figures and a development team. That’s the wrong picture. The apps a service business actually needs are small, internal, and specific: a checklist your techs open at the unit, a time clock that reminds people to punch in, a price lookup the crew can trust from a driveway. Tools, not products.
Those don’t cost six figures. But the honest answer on price starts with what drives it, so here’s that, plus my own numbers, which are public on the pricing page.
What actually drives the price
Every custom tool I quote comes down to three questions:
- What does it connect to? A tool that reads one spreadsheet is simple. A tool that pulls from your field service software, writes back to it, and texts your crew touches three systems. Each connection is real work.
- How much logic does it carry? A checklist records what happened. A payroll tool has to know your overtime rules, your pay periods, and what to do when someone forgets to clock out. Rules cost more than records.
- Who uses it and how? A tool the whole crew logs into needs accounts, permissions, and a design that survives a cracked phone screen in the rain. A tool for one office manager doesn’t.
Notice what’s not on the list: how big your company is. A custom tool doesn’t charge per seat. Five techs or twenty five, the build is the build.
The math against per-seat software
This is where custom tools quietly win. Off-the-shelf software rents you a solution: a tool at $20 per user per month for a ten-person crew is $2,400 a year, every year, forever, and it still works the vendor’s way instead of yours.
A custom internal tool is a one-time build you own, plus a small monthly care plan. My internal tools start at $2,500, with simpler single-job tools landing closer to the price of a small automation. The care plan is $150 a month and covers monitoring, fixes, and small improvements. Run that math over three years and the custom tool built exactly for your workflow often costs less than the subscription that was never quite right.
What these look like in the real world
These are real tools I’ve built for service businesses around Akron:
- A PM checklist app techs open by scanning a QR code on the equipment. No clipboard, no lost forms.
- A time clock with SMS reminders, so payroll stops depending on anyone’s memory of Tuesday.
- An AI price lookup that answers pricing questions from the company’s own price book, on a phone, in the driveway.
- A route-aware call sheet that turns overdue maintenance into a sorted morning of phone calls.
Each one killed a specific daily annoyance. None of them took months to build. That’s the scale to have in mind, and there’s more on the internal tools page.
How to scope yours without wasting money
Start with the messiest part of the day, not the biggest idea. The tool worth building first is the one replacing paper, group texts, or a whiteboard right now. Scope it to one job, get it in the crew’s hands, and let the next tool earn its spot after the first one proves out.
That’s also how I quote: flat, per tool, after a short call. Book a call and describe the daily mess. I’ll tell you whether a custom tool fixes it, what it would cost, and if a plain automation does the job cheaper, you’ll hear that instead.