What does construction software actually cost a UK contractor?

Five categories cover most of the software spend in a firm under about twenty people. Each one arrives on its own, for its own good reason, usually after something went wrong.

• Job management. The customer, the quote, the job, the diary and the invoice. Usually the first thing bought and the biggest single line.
• Estimating. A price book, labour rates and a way of turning a take-off into a quote. Often one or two people rather than the whole firm.
• Clocking in and timesheets. Who was on site, for how long, and how the hours reach payroll.
• HR and holiday. Staff records, holiday requests, absence, documents against a person.
• Site safety. RAMS, inductions, toolbox talks, the accident book and certification expiry.

Nobody buys all five on one afternoon. The job management system comes first because the paper diary failed. The clocking app comes eighteen months later because a timesheet was invented. The RAMS subscription comes the week a principal contractor asked for one. Each purchase is sound on the day it is made.

No one decides the total. Five people decide five line items, and the total is whatever those five add up to.

This is the category where the billing unit matters most, because two of the vendors charge a flat company total and the rest charge per head. At ten people, the cheapest of them costs less in a year than the dearest costs in a month, and they are not all selling the same thing.

Two things about that BrightHR row. The £83.35 is a company total on a basis of five employees, not a rate per head, so it is not a ten-person price. And BrightHR’s own FAQ on the same page says prices start from £3.00 per person depending on business size, so multiplying the £16.67 headline by ten would overstate what they charge. Their real ten-person rate sits somewhere between those two and they do not publish where.

NoteBanded pricing is cheap in the middle of a band and expensive at the top of one. Breathe’s Micro band runs to ten people. The eleventh hire moves the firm to Starter at £44 a month, an 83% rise for one person.

The band also buys core HR only. Breathe sells Rota, Time and Attendance as an add-on from £11 a month per business and Health and Safety from £12 a month per business, both on top. Sage HR works the same way: Timesheets and Shift Scheduling are £2.30 per employee a month each, which takes a ten-person firm from £46.00 to £92.00.

The cheapest category on the list, and the one where the headline rate is least likely to be the bill. Three of these six carry either a company base fee on top of the per-head rate or a minimum number of people you are charged for whether you have them or not.

TimeKeeper’s page defaults to the annual toggle, so the first figure a visitor sees is £3.33 rather than £4.00. On annual billing a firm of ten is invoiced £400 a year, which is the vendor’s own per-employee-per-year figure rather than the rounded monthly rate times twelve.

NoteClockShark and Clockify both bill UK customers in a currency that is not sterling, so the invoice moves with the exchange rate even when the list price does not. ClockShark’s pricing page also states that a three-year contract term applies to all plans.

The biggest line, and the widest spread. One vendor charges by the number of jobs a month and ignores headcount entirely. The rest charge per person who needs a login.

ServiceM8 charges by jobs a month. Tradify, Powered Now and Joblogic charge by heads. At ten people that is a gap of several hundred pounds a month for software covering roughly the same ground.

Powered Now’s ladder has a step in it that catches people out. Business at £28 a month ex VAT is a company price for one person only. The second person moves the firm onto Professional, which is charged per user, so the bill goes from £28 a month to £64 for the second hire and keeps climbing from there.

The category where the unit of sale moves most. One vendor sells a seat, one sells a named licence, one sells a book, and one gives it away.

Most firms of ten do not buy ten estimating seats. One or two people price work, so this line is usually one or two licences however the vendor bills. Two HBXL licences on subscription is £899 plus £249 for the additional licence, about £96 a month when spread across the year.

NoteHBXL’s £29.99 a month Support and Updates plan is the figure most often misread as the price of the software. It buys support for a perpetual licence already owned and buys no licence at all.

The category with the largest free option in the whole survey sitting next to some of the highest list prices in it.

HandsHQ also sells individual plans, and on those the binding constraint is documents rather than people. Basic is £44 a month ex VAT, £52.80 including VAT, and produces one RAMS a month. A second RAMS in the same month means moving up to £99 a month. The individual ladder tops out at three people, so a firm of ten cannot buy one at all and falls to the team band.

The free SafetyCulture tier is real and it caps at ten team members, five active templates and three years of history. For a ten-person firm doing inspections and audits, that is a working product at no cost. It is not a RAMS system with versioned documents and per-operative sign-off, so it does not answer the thing a principal contractor asks for.

Because six different mechanisms sit between the rate on the page and the figure on the invoice, and most pages show one of them.

1. 01A company base fee. QuickBooks Time adds £16 a month before the first per-user charge. ClockShark adds US$42. A one-person account is the base plus the seat, not the seat.
2. 02A seat floor. Planday’s Starter has a five-person minimum, so the smallest bill is £14.95 a month however few people you have.
3. 03A band. Breathe, myhrtoolkit, swiftRMS, Site Manager Pro and HandsHQ all charge a flat company total for a range of headcount. You pay the same at the bottom of a band as at the top, and a single hire can move you up a rung.
4. 04A rate that falls with headcount. BrightHR’s headline is £16.67 per employee a month and its own FAQ says prices start from £3.00 per person depending on size. Multiplying the headline overstates the bill.
5. 05A currency that is not sterling. Clockify and ClockShark both bill UK customers in dollars, so the invoice moves with the exchange rate.
6. 06A default toggle. TimeKeeper’s page opens on annual billing, so the first number shown is the annual-equivalent rate rather than what monthly billing costs.

And then there is the term, which is the part a comparison table almost never carries.

The rate is what you compare. The term is what you sign. A firm halfway through a five-year HR contract cannot move on price.

By making five reasonable decisions eighteen months apart. Here is a stack a real firm of ten could easily be carrying, with every figure taken from the tables above.

That is about £796 a month, or roughly £9,550 a year, for a firm turning over perhaps a million. Nobody approved that number. Five people approved five numbers, none of which looked unreasonable on the day, and four of those five decisions were made by somebody who did not know what the other three cost.

The same firm, buying differently, could be on ServiceM8 Growing at £59 a month, Breathe Micro at £24 a month, the free SafetyCulture tier and PriceMyJob, for about £83 a month all in. That firm is not better at buying software. It has bought less of it, and it is missing things the first firm needs: versioned RAMS with per-operative sign-off, CIS deducted on labour only across the 6th-to-5th tax months, Construction Act payment applications with their notice deadlines, and job costing against certified value.

The question is not which stack is cheaper. It is which line items you are paying for twice, and which ones you are not paying for at all.

Three overlaps are worth checking on your own bank statement. Holiday booking is usually in both the HR system and the job management system. Timesheets are usually in both the clocking app and the job management system. And inductions, toolbox talks and certification expiry are often in the HR system, the safety system and a spreadsheet at the same time.

Software replaces software. Several of the lines above are not software at all, and moving the software half does not move them.

• The employment law advice line. BrightHR’s Enhanced tier and Citation’s entire product are a staffed service with people on the end of a phone. Keep it and drop only the overlap.
• Tribunal and employment indemnity insurance. Sold alongside the advice line, quoted separately, and not something a software subscription contains.
• A maintained library of HR policies and letters. Breathe and BrightHR both keep one current with UK employment law.
• A library of professionally reviewed risk assessments. HandsHQ’s real product is thousands of curated method statements and hazard libraries maintained by safety professionals.
• Measured-work rates coded to NRM or SMM. Spon’s and Laxton’s are what a QS needs on a formal tender, and at the price of a book a year nobody is trying to save that line.
• Site-access hardware. Turnstiles, biometrics and badge readers on a tier-one site are a different purchase from a QR code on a poster.
• Telematics. Live vehicle tracking, driver behaviour and route optimisation are a separate product from a vehicle record.

Work out which of those you are actually buying before comparing a per-head rate against a per-head rate. A contractor on a Citation contract is buying advice and cover, and the software is the part they use least.

Solo is £39 a month +VAT for up to 2 users and 20 open jobs. Core is £129 a month +VAT for up to 5 users, with office seats at £39 a month +VAT and field seats at £29 a month +VAT beyond that. Pro is £299 a month +VAT for up to 20 users, with seats at £49 a month +VAT and £29 a month +VAT. Enterprise is quoted. There is a 14-day trial. All prices exclude VAT, added at 20% at checkout.

The categories above map onto modules rather than onto separate subscriptions. Health & Safety is £19 a month +VAT on its own and bundled from Solo upward, and it holds versioned RAMS with per-operative sign-off, site inductions, toolbox talks with a signed attendance register, near-miss reports and the accident book. Timesheets is £15 a month +VAT, bundled from Solo upward, and the hours land on the job rather than in a CSV. HR Management is £29 a month +VAT, bundled from Pro upward, and Training & Qualifications is £12 a month +VAT, bundled from Pro upward. Job Costing is £25 a month +VAT, bundled from Core upward. CIS Compliance is £19 a month +VAT, bundled from Solo upward.

Quoting, invoicing and the job record are on every plan, so the job management line and the estimating line are the same subscription rather than two.

Now the limits, because a firm consolidating onto one system needs them before it cancels anything.

• Estimark holds no security or safety certification: no ISO 27001, no SOC 2, no Cyber Essentials, and it is not SSIP, CHAS, SafeContractor or SMAS assessed. Using it does not accredit you. It holds the evidence an assessor asks for.
• It does not file a CIS300 to HMRC on your behalf. It records the return with both statutory declarations and locks it to its tax month.
• Your customers cannot pay by card or Direct Debit through Estimark. Invoices carry your bank details and are settled by bank transfer.
• It does not file RIDDOR. It classifies the duty, works out the statutory deadline from the date of the accident and chases it. The F2508 is still submitted by a person on hse.gov.uk.
• It does not run payroll or file RTI. It exports payroll files for your payroll system or bureau, including a P32 and an RTI-layout CSV, and those exports are labelled as estimates rather than filed returns.
• There is no employment law advice line, no indemnity insurance and no library of reviewed risk assessments. Safety content generated in Estimark has to be checked by a competent person before it is issued.
• The price book is built from merchant product prices and your own invoice history, not from NRM or SMM measured-work rates, and it produces no standard-form bill of quantities.

See Estimark pricing for the full ladder, job costing and CVR for the cost side, and Estimark for builders and contractors.