The Per-Seat Tax: What a 2-Person Crew Actually Pays

Every field-service app advertises its solo price. One guy, one truck, one login — looks reasonable.

Then you hire a helper. Or your spouse starts answering the phone and needs to see the schedule. Or a part-timer needs to clock jobs from the field. That's when the per-seat tax shows up: the price you saw on the homepage was the price for a company of one, and every real company is bigger than one.

I run a small crew myself. I built NailLedger because I wanted to ease my job, not feed a subscription that grows every time my business does. Here's the math that pushed me there — using each company's own published pricing, checked October 2026.

The table nobody puts on their homepage

Crew size	Jobber Core	Housecall Pro Basic	NailLedger Pro
Just you	$49/mo	$79/mo	$29/mo
You + 1	$78/mo	~$189/mo	$29/mo
You + 2	$107/mo	Higher tier again	$29/mo

How each one gets there:

• Jobber Core starts at $49/mo and adds $29/mo for every additional user. Fair enough as a model — but it means your software bill is a headcount bill. Two people: $78. Three: $107.
• Housecall Pro Basic starts at $79/mo for one user. Add a second user and you're pushed up to roughly $189/mo — more than double, for one extra login.
• NailLedger Pro is $29/mo flat. Same price for one user or a small crew, because the app was priced for the little guy on purpose.

Run it out a year

Monthly numbers are easy to shrug off. Annual numbers aren't:

• 2-person crew: Jobber ≈ $936/yr · Housecall Pro ≈ $2,268/yr · NailLedger $348/yr
• That gap — roughly $590 to $1,900 a year — is a used trailer. It's your insurance deductible. It's the marketing budget you keep saying you'll start next quarter.

And the tax compounds in a second way: per-seat pricing makes you share logins and keep people out of the system — the helper texts you for the address, your spouse can't see tomorrow's jobs, the part-timer's hours live in a notebook. The software that's supposed to organize the business ends up rationed, and the disorganization it was bought to fix leaks back in through the side door.

What "flat" actually has to include to be honest

A flat price that strips out the features a crew needs would just be a different tax. NailLedger's $29 covers the whole job record — design, the bid document (we call it an Investment Summary, because your customer is investing in their home), job tracking, and invoicing — plus the Vision Preview that renders the finished job from a before photo. There's a free tier to start, and render packs if you burn through previews on big estimate weeks. No per-seat line, ever.

The question to ask any software rep

Don't ask "what does it cost?" Ask: "What does it cost when there are three of us, in month thirteen?" If the answer needs a calculator and a tier chart, you're looking at a per-seat tax — and it will be due every month your business is alive.

Pricing checked against Jobber's and Housecall Pro's published plans in October 2026; vendors change pricing, so confirm current numbers on their sites. NailLedger pricing: nailledger.com/pricing.

Join the Waitlist See the features