Four ServiceM8 alternatives on published facts. And the case for not moving at all.
ServiceM8 publishes prices of $0 to $349 a month including GST with unlimited users, and a full API. Of the four alternatives Australian trades actually consider — Tradify, Fergus, Simpro and AroFlo — two publish a price and three publish an API. For most businesses under the job ceiling, staying is the right answer. Here is how to tell.
Why people go looking, and which reasons are good ones
Three complaints bring most people to this page. The job ceiling: ServiceM8’s plans are metered by jobs a month — 30 free, then 50, 150, 500 and “1,500+” at $29, $79, $149 and $349 including GST (ServiceM8 Australian pricing, fetched 3 September 2026) — and a high-volume, small-crew business hits it fast. No phone support: ServiceM8 routes everything through email, chat and its partner network. And the webhooks: they tell you a record changed and not what it changed to, so every event costs a second API call (our ServiceM8 page).
The first is a good reason to look, and the arithmetic below shows why. The second is a good reason for some owners and we will not talk you out of it. The third is a developer’s complaint, not an owner’s, and it is fixable in the integration rather than by changing products.
The bad reason is the one that brings most people here: a feature you saw in a demo. Every product in this category has features the others lack. None of them will fix a quoting process that lives in someone’s head. Choosing job management software is the page for that conversation; this one is about the four products.
When to stay on the incumbent
Stay if you are under 500 jobs a month with more than two people. Premium is $149 a month including GST for unlimited users and 500 jobs (ServiceM8, fetched 3 September 2026). The same six-person crew on Tradify Pro is six times $52 excluding GST, or about $343 including (Tradify, fetched 3 September 2026). On Simpro or AroFlo you cannot know without a sales call. Unlimited users is the single biggest thing ServiceM8 gives a growing crew, and no alternative on this page matches it at a published price.
Stay if anything else talks to it. ServiceM8 publishes a full API — 180 requests a minute, 20,000 a day per app per account, webhooks on nine record types — and it is one of the nine systems we have built against in production. Tradify has no API at all. Moving off ServiceM8 to Tradify means every integration you have stops, permanently, with no way to rebuild it. That is not a migration cost; it is a capability you lose.
Stay if the complaint is about your process. Job management software makes a process faster. It does not make a bad one good. If quotes go out late because nobody owns quoting, they will go out late on Fergus too. Fix the process on the product you know, then decide whether you still want to move. Most of the time you will not, and we would rather say so than sell you a migration.
The four alternatives, on what each publishes
Two of these we have built against — Simpro and ServiceM8 itself. Tradify, Fergus and AroFlo we have not, and their columns are their own published pages, fetched on one day and linked. Where a vendor publishes nothing, the table says so rather than guessing.
| ServiceM8 | Tradify | Fergus | Simpro | AroFlo | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Published price | Yes $0, $29, $79, $149, $349 a month inc GST. | Yes $48, $52, $62 per user a month ex GST. | Partly “From $53” and “from $77” a month. Unit and GST not stated. | No None. “Request Pricing.” | No None. “Request Pricing.” |
| What the price meters | Yes Jobs a month. Unlimited users on every paid plan. | Partly Users. Unlimited jobs. | Partly Base plan plus timesheet users from $26 and contractors $4 a day. | Not assessed Not published. | Not assessed Not published. |
| Public API | Yes 180 a minute, 20,000 a day. Webhooks on nine record types, no payload. | No None on any official domain. | Yes OpenAPI 3.1, personal access tokens since July 2025. Rate limit not numbered. | Yes 10 a second per build. About 110 signed webhooks. No daily cap. | Partly 120 a minute, 2,000 calls a day. No webhooks. |
| Phone support published | No Email, chat and partners. No phone. | Yes 24 hours, five days, from Chatswood. | Partly Listed as a Professional-tier feature. | Partly 1300 number published. Hours not stated on the page. | Partly “Training & Customer Support” listed. Hours not stated. |
| Head office | Not assessed Australia. | Not assessed Chatswood, NSW. | Not assessed Auckland, NZ. Sydney office. | Not assessed Eight Mile Plains, Brisbane. | Not assessed Melbourne. Owned by Simpro since November 2021. |
| Assessed by us | Yes Built against in production. | No Documentation only. | No Documentation only. | Yes Built against in production. | No Documentation only. |
Tradify, if the job ceiling is the problem
Tradify prices per user with unlimited jobs, which is the exact inverse of ServiceM8, and for a small crew doing many small jobs it is much cheaper. Two people at 800 jobs a month need ServiceM8 Premium Plus at $349 including GST; on Tradify Pro they pay two times $52 excluding GST, about $114 including. That is a third of the cost and it would be dishonest to bury it (the full arithmetic is on ServiceM8 versus Tradify).
The price of that is the API, or rather the absence of one. Tradify publishes no developer documentation of any kind, so anything you want it to do that it does not do is not possible without Tradify building it. If nothing else talks to your job system and never will, that is irrelevant. If anything does, it is disqualifying.
It also publishes the clearest support offer on this page — 24 hours a day, five days a week, by phone — and a feature ladder you can read without a sales call. For a sole trader who wants to ring someone, Tradify is a reasonable answer and ServiceM8 is not.
Fergus, if you want an API and a phone number
Fergus is the only alternative here that publishes both a price and an API. The API arrived in stages through 2025 — personal access tokens in July, job creation and user management endpoints in August, company-specific rate limiting in November (Fergus release notes, fetched 3 September 2026) — and there is a Zapier app on top of it. Tokens expire after 365 days and are tied to a user, which is a design constraint worth knowing before you build.
The price is less clear than Tradify’s. “From $53” and “from $77” a month, with no statement of what that is per or whether GST is included (Fergus pricing, fetched 3 September 2026). Phone support is listed under the Professional tier, so the $53 figure may not include it. Get both in writing before comparing to ServiceM8’s $149.
And it is a New Zealand company with a Sydney office. That is not a mark against it. It does mean that a release note about NZ payee-name fields is Fergus serving its home market, and that “local” means something slightly different. Tradify versus Fergus puts the two published-price alternatives side by side.
Simpro or AroFlo, if you have outgrown it — and neither will tell you the price
These two are the step up: projects, inventory, multiple business units, subcontractor management, the things a service business needs when it becomes a contracting business. AroFlo lists Gantt charts, inventory kits, schedule of rates, stock control, compliance forms and access to more than 600 connected suppliers on its single plan (AroFlo, fetched 3 September 2026). Simpro’s category is the same.
They have had the same owner since 24 November 2021 (Simpro press release), and neither publishes a price. Both pricing pages end in “Request Pricing”. So the honest comparison with ServiceM8’s $349 top plan is: we cannot make it, and neither can anyone else without a quote dated today. Get the licence, the implementation fee and the per-user increment in writing, separately.
On the API they differ sharply, and we have built against one of them. Simpro publishes about 110 signed webhooks, 10 requests a second per build and no daily cap; AroFlo publishes no webhooks and a 2,000-call daily limit. If integrations matter, that is the deciding fact, and Simpro versus AroFlo works through it.
What switching actually costs, before the licence
Your job history. Every product will import customers; fewer will import completed jobs with their attachments, photos and notes, and none will import them perfectly. Decide before you move whether you need three years of job history in the new system or a read-only export of it somewhere safe. The second is cheaper and usually enough.
Your integrations. Anything connected to ServiceM8’s API stops the day you switch. On Fergus, Simpro or AroFlo it can be rebuilt against a different API with different behaviour; on Tradify it cannot be rebuilt at all. Count what is connected — accounting sync, forms, payments, anything custom — and price the rebuild before you price the licence.
Your crew’s habits. The product that feels wrong to a plumber at 7am gets worked around, and the workaround is a notebook. Every product on this page publishes a trial, and ServiceM8 keeps a permanently free plan at 30 jobs a month. Before you commit, run a fortnight of real work and watch for four things.
- #1A real variationRaise one mid-job, price it, get it approved and invoice it. This is where trade software shows whether the people who built it have been on site.
- #2A bad connectionOpen a job card on the phone in a basement or a plant room. The app that needs signal to show yesterday’s notes will be abandoned by the crew within a month.
- #3The Friday exportPull a week of completed jobs into your accounting package and check what your bookkeeper has to fix. This is the re-keying you were trying to remove.
- #4LeavingExport everything on day thirteen of the trial and look at what you get. If you cannot get your data out of the trial cleanly, you will not get it out of the paid plan either.
What we have not assessed
Tradify, Fergus and AroFlo as products. We have never run a job through any of them. Their columns are their own pricing pages, help centres and API documentation, fetched on one day and linked. We cannot tell you how their mobile apps behave on a bad connection or what their exports look like.
ServiceM8 and Simpro as products. We have built against both, which means we know their APIs and not necessarily how their scheduling feels on site. Whether either handles a variation or a progress claim the way your trade does is not something an integration tells you.
Ascora, Fieldmagic, Jobber, Housecall Pro and the vertical products for single trades. Their absence here means we have not assessed them, not that they lost. The capability register lists what we have actually built against, and the trade-specific pages under /best cover what a plumber or a sparkie should look for that a generic list misses.
The questions people actually ask.
01We are hitting the job ceiling. Is that enough reason to move?
Do the sum first. Premium Plus at $349 including GST covers 1,500-plus jobs with unlimited users. If you have two people, Tradify at about $114 is a third of that and the ceiling is a real reason. If you have eight people, Tradify is about $457 and the ceiling is not a reason at all. The crossover is your jobs-to-people ratio, and it is a five-minute calculation.
02Which alternative do you recommend?
None of them, without knowing your jobs, your crew and what else is connected. Tradify if the ratio favours per-user pricing and nothing will ever integrate. Fergus if you want an API and a published price. Simpro or AroFlo if you have become a contractor rather than a service business, with the caveat that neither will tell you what it costs. And ServiceM8, for most people reading this, because unlimited users at $149 is hard to leave.
03You have built on ServiceM8. Is the stay section just protecting your work?
The stay case rests on ServiceM8’s published prices and API, which anyone can check, and on the fact that Tradify has no API, which anyone can check too. We have also said plainly where Tradify is a third of the cost and where Fergus publishes things ServiceM8 does not. If the arithmetic says move, move — we build against Simpro as well, and against nothing on Tradify, so we have no stake in which way you go.
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