This calculator compares five years of software licences — seats, price rises, implementation and the integration you still need — against building and running your own. Every default is a vendor’s published Australian list price, fetched and dated below. None is a Kindra benchmark. Most businesses should buy, and the calculator will often say so.
Rent — a subscription
Default is ServiceM8 Growing, $79/month inc GST, as at 3 September 2026. Put your own product's list price in.
Xero's Australian Starter plan went from $54 to $78 over four years — about 9.6% a year compounded. 8% is a deliberate default, not a measurement.
Data migration, training, the fortnight of double-running.
The connector, the Zapier plan, the person who re-keys what the product will not do.
Own — a build
Blank on purpose. Use the quote in front of you — Kindra publishes no benchmark build price.
What the quote says it costs to run, including model and API usage if any.
Anyone who says zero is selling. Ask the developer what they budget for it.
Five-year cost, both sides
The rent side is real; the own side needs a quote. Without one, the honest answer is "buy" — a build you cannot price is not an option yet.
| Year | Rent | Own |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | $2,448 | — |
| 2 | $2,524 | — |
| 3 | $2,606 | — |
| 4 | $2,694 | — |
| 5 | $2,790 | — |
Nothing is sent anywhere. Defaults are published list prices with their dates on this page; the build side is yours to fill from a quote.
Every number pre-filled in this calculator is a price a vendor publishes on its Australian pricing page, read on 3 September 2026. ServiceM8 lists Starter at $29 a month, Growing at $79, Premium at $149 and Premium Plus at $349, all including GST, all with unlimited users and job caps of 50, 150, 500 and 1,500 respectively; SMS is 10 cents each. ServiceM8 pricing, Australia, fetched 3 September 2026. Tradify lists Lite at $48, Pro at $52 and Plus at $62 per user per month, excluding GST. Tradify pricing, Australia, fetched 3 September 2026. Xero lists Grow at $78, Comprehensive at $107 and Ultimate 10 at $143 a month including GST, with 90% off the first three months for new customers until 30 September 2026. Xero pricing plans, Australia, fetched 3 September 2026. Simpro publishes no price at all — its pricing page says "Request pricing". Simpro pricing page, fetched 3 September 2026.
None of these is a Kindra benchmark. The inventory for this page said the defaults would be seeded from our own Australian data; we do not have any that we could defend, so they are seeded from the vendors instead and labelled as such. If a default looks wrong for your business, it is. Change it. The calculator is the arithmetic, not the answer.
And the arithmetic will frequently say buy. We build custom software and we say that on the custom-versus-off-the-shelf page and again here: most businesses should licence a product and build only the joins between products. This tool exists to find the exceptions honestly, not to manufacture them.
Most businesses should buy. We build custom software, and the calculator on this page will usually agree with us.
The tool is built to find the exceptions, not to manufacture them.
Licence per seat per month is the list price for the plan you would actually be on, not the cheapest. Six in the field and two in the office is eight seats on a per-user product. Match the GST treatment to the build quote: Tradify quotes ex GST, ServiceM8 and Xero include it, and that alone makes comparisons wrong by 10%.
Seats is today’s headcount plus the growth you expect. Per-seat pricing means hiring two people in year three raises the software bill for years three, four and five. Flat-priced products like ServiceM8 have job caps instead, so the growth line there is jobs per month crossing a tier boundary — 150 to 500 is a jump from $79 to $149.
Annual price increase is the default most people leave alone and should not. Xero’s Australian mid-tier plan went from $54 a month in June 2022 to $59 that September, $65 in September 2023, $70 in July 2024, $75 in July 2025 and $78 from 1 July 2026 — 44% in four years against CPI of 16.6%. Rechargly, Xero’s Australian price rises charted, covering June 2022 to July 2026. The July 2026 round alone ranged from 4% on Grow to 12.6% on Ultimate 50, and the multi-organisation discount was removed. PP Tax, 2026 Xero price increase, 14 May 2026. Compounded, Xero’s four-year rise is about 9.6% a year. A global index of enterprise software pricing hit 16.4% in June 2026, almost four times US CPI of 4.2%. Vertice SaaS Inflation Index, June 2026, updated July 2026. The default here is 8% a year — under Xero’s measured Australian rate, well under the global index, and a choice you should override with your own vendor’s history if you have it.
Implementation is what it costs to get onto the product: data migration, setup, training and the weeks of reduced output while people learn it. Vendors rarely publish this and it is often bigger than the first year of licences. Simpro publishes neither a licence price nor an implementation price, and the calculator leaves this line at zero until you enter what you were quoted — which is a wrong number you will notice, rather than a plausible one you will not.
Integration and maintenance is the line the buy side forgets. Buying a job management product does not remove the need to connect it to your accounting file, your phone system and your forms. Some of that is included — ServiceM8 and Simpro both integrate with Xero natively, and the ServiceM8 page and the Simpro page say exactly what those integrations carry and what they do not. The rest is either a Zapier or n8n subscription plus somebody’s time, or a small custom join. Enter what that costs a year. If you do not know, the honest default is not zero.
This is also where the buy side hides its process cost: the workarounds. A spreadsheet that exists because the product cannot do one thing, a re-keying step between two products that do not talk. The calculator has a line for it because leaving it out is how buy always wins on paper and loses in the office.
Build cost is the quote you have in hand, including GST if the licences do. If you do not have a quote, the calculator does not guess one, because our own typical quote is not a market benchmark and putting it here would make the tool a sales page.
Hosting is what it costs to run the thing: servers or serverless, database, backups, monitoring, domain and certificates. It is small for most small-business systems and it is never zero. Read your host’s pricing page and enter the monthly figure; we have not put a default here because the right number depends on what is built, and a fabricated one would be worse than a blank.
Ongoing changes is the line that decides most comparisons and the one people most want to leave at zero. Software you own still needs to change when the tax rules change, when a connected API changes — Xero’s did in March 2026 and MYOB’s in September 2026, both documented on the integration pages — and when you want something new. Enter a yearly figure. If a build quote comes with a support retainer, that is the number. If it comes with nothing, ask why, and read ownership and security for what should be in your hands if the builder walks.
The buy total is: seats × licence per month × 12, compounded by the annual increase each year, plus implementation in year one, plus integration and maintenance every year. The build total is: build cost in year one, plus hosting × 12 every year, plus ongoing changes every year. Both are summed over five years and shown side by side, with a per-year breakdown underneath so you can see where they cross, if they cross.
Two deliberate omissions. It does not discount future dollars; over five years at small-business scale the effect is smaller than the uncertainty in your inputs, and adding it would make the tool look more precise than it is. And it adds no risk premium to the build side, though one belongs there — see the next section. Hold both in your head rather than letting a formula hide them.
Five years is a choice too. Three flatters buying, because the build has not amortised; ten flatters building, because it assumes the business looks the same a decade out. Five is where most businesses we talk to actually plan.
If buy wins, buy. That will be the result for most businesses entering real numbers, and it is not a failure of the tool. A product thousands of businesses use has had its edge cases found by those thousands; a build has not. Spend the difference on the integration line and come back when your seat count or workaround line changes.
If the two lines land close — within about 20% of each other over five years — buy, because the buy path has less variance. A build can run over; a licence cannot. Small businesses are hurt by variance more than by cost, and a calculator cannot see variance.
If build wins clearly, check three things before believing it. First, is the ongoing-changes line realistic, or is it the number that made build win? Second, does the win survive with the annual increase set to zero — if the case for owning rests entirely on assumed price rises, it is a bet on the vendor’s behaviour, not on your business. Third, does one of the three conditions on the build-vs-buy framework hold — the process is how you compete, the workarounds cost more than the build, or nothing exists for what you do? If none holds and build still wins, the inputs are optimistic.
And read the per-year breakdown. A build that costs more over five years but less from year three onward is a different decision from one that never catches up, and the total alone cannot tell you which you have.
It cannot tell you whether your process is worth keeping. A build makes your process permanent; if the process is the problem, you have paid to preserve it. Read what not to automate first if you suspect that.
It cannot price the middle path, where most businesses we talk to end up: keep the products, build the joins. That is a much smaller build against a much smaller saving, usually the right answer, and this tool’s two columns have no slot for it. The integration line on the buy side is the nearest thing.
It is not gated: no email, no account, nothing you type leaves your browser. And it cannot tell you what the vendor will do. Xero’s history above is one vendor over four years in one country. ServiceM8’s pricing page carries no date and no history; Tradify’s and Simpro’s neither. The default increase is a documented choice, not a forecast, and the tool is honest exactly to the extent that you replace it with what you know.
Because a build sold to someone who did not need one goes badly, and we are still around when it does. The defaults are vendor list prices rather than our numbers for the same reason: if we seeded the tool with our own figures, you would be right to wonder which way they leaned. Enter real inputs and the result is usually buy. That is the correct result, and we would rather you got it here than after a deposit.
Because the 16.4% is a global, enterprise-weighted index built from one vendor-management platform’s customers, and the products a Brisbane trade business licenses are not that market. Xero’s measured Australian history — 44% over four years, about 9.6% a year compounded — is closer to home, and 8% sits under it. It is still a choice. If your vendor has published its own history, use that instead, and if it has published nothing, that silence is itself worth noting.
Because the buy side has published list prices and the build side does not. A vendor puts its price on a page; a builder quotes your job. We could have filled the build side with our own typical figures, and then the tool would be a pitch with a spreadsheet attached. Leaving it blank makes the tool less convenient and more honest, and the second matters more.
Bring the one flow that keeps costing you a Tuesday afternoon. We map it live and tell you what we'd build, what we wouldn't, and what it costs.