What your software
really costs
over five years

Most businesses pay for software one subscription at a time, and nobody ever adds it up. A job management app for the crews, a CRM someone signed up for, accounting, a form builder, e-signatures, the phone system, the office suite, a spreadsheet that quietly became the quoting system. Each one is “only” a few dollars a seat. This audit adds them up over five years, the way a buyer of the business would, with the seats growing as you hire and the prices rising the way subscriptions do.

You get four things: the five-year total (subscriptions, tax and the hours spent re-typing between tools), the tools that overlap, a comparison with a custom-built system shown as a band, and a verdict: stay on what you have, consolidate, or build. The verdict follows rules written on this page, and the first rule is the one that says keep what you have. The headline is never gated. An email unlocks the full report: year by year, tool by tool, ready to print.

The owner or office manager of a business with three or more tools and five or more people: trades and home-services companies first, where a job management app, the books and a spreadsheet or two are the usual stack, and just as much clinics, agencies, distributors and B2B services. If you have ever typed the same customer into two systems, it is for you.

It is not a software price comparison. It will not tell you which job management app is cheapest; it tells you what the whole stack costs and whether the shape of it is the problem. And it is honest about teams under 5: for them a custom system is more than the team needs, and the tool says so whatever the numbers come to.

For each of the five years:

Overlaps are two or more tools in the same category, plus one pair we treat as the same job: customer list: crm and job management, because every job management app carries a customer list. The saving an overlap offers is the five-year cost of the cheaper tool(s): what you stop paying when you keep one.

The custom comparison is a band, never a quote: build cost between a low and a high, plus yearly care. The running custom cost by year is the band’s midpoint plus care × years. Break-even is the first year your running stack cost passes it. The three fixes are the overlap saving, the re-typing cost and the gap between the stack and the custom band, ranked by money; whichever is biggest is where to start.

The verdict is rule-based. Here are the rules, in the order they are tested; several can fire and the result lists which did.

1. Three tools or fewer, no overlap, under 3 hours a week of re-typing: keep what you have.
2. Two tools in the same category: consolidate (the saving is the cheaper tool’s five-year cost).
3. 10 or more hours a week of re-typing: consolidate or connect the tools.
4. Custom only when the five-year stack cost is at least 1.2× the custom five-year cost, the team is 5 or more, and break-even comes by year 3.
5. If the five-year stack cost is below the custom five-year cost, custom is off the table.
6. Under 5 people: custom is off the table whatever the numbers say.
7. A tool from the list with no verified public price uses the figure you entered; the result is only as good as that figure.

The verdict: stay on what you have when the few-tools rule fires; a custom system pays for itself when the custom-pays rule fires; consolidate before you build when there is overlap or heavy re-typing; otherwise keep.

What the tool assumes, and where each assumption lives:

• Prices. The product list holds 41 products, each priced from the vendor’s own public pricing page (last checked 2026-10-13). Each price is the lowest list price per month: the yearly-billing rate where the vendor offers one, never a promotion, so the audit never makes a tool look more expensive than it is; each row says how its price is billed. 120 plan prices show on this site; 5 ask you to enter what you pay, because the vendor has no public price or we could not read one in your currency. We never guess a vendor’s price.
• Annual increase. The slider starts at 5% a year. That is our planning assumption, not a published statistic; set what your renewals have actually done.
• Exchange rate. The example uses 1.35 Canadian dollars per US dollar. It is an input, not a live rate; check today’s and enter it.
• Sales tax. The example uses 13%, the HST rate in Ontario; enter your own rate, or 0 if you recover it.
• Custom-build band. The low end, $4,000, is our published “projects from” price for CRM and ERP work. The high end ($12,000) and yearly care (15% of the build) are planning assumptions shown as inputs. A real figure only comes after a scoping conversation.
• Re-typing stays flat. The hours you enter are charged every year; growth would usually add to them, so this is the kind side.
• Rounding. Figures are rounded so the headline doesn’t pretend to be exact.

The numbers the calculator opens with: a 6-person trades business adding 1 person a year, so 10 people by year five. It pays for 9 tools, 6 of them per seat and 8 billed in US dollars at 1.35, with prices rising 5% a year and 13% tax. The office spends 6 hours a week re-typing between the job app, the books and the spreadsheets, at $35 an hour.

• Subscriptions over five years: $72,100, plus $9,400 tax.
• Re-typing: 6 × 52 × $35 × 5 = $54,600.
• Overlap: customer list: crm and job management: Job management app and A second customer list (CRM). Keeping one saves up to $3,550 over five years.

That is $136,000 over five years. A custom system in the $4,000 to $12,000 band, with 15% a year of care, costs about $14,000 over the same five years, and the stack passes it in year 1. The verdict is a custom system pays for itself: at least two of your tools do the same job; five-year stack cost is well above the custom band, the team is big enough, and break-even comes early.

The biggest fix is scoping one system that fits, worth $122,000 over five years on its own. Drop the second customer list, halve the re-typing or shrink the team to four, and watch the verdict change.