Everything UK trade owners ask on the discovery call. The OptitechAutomation FAQ is grouped into five sections — pricing, trade-specific compliance, technical, Founders' Cohort, and migration. Written by Cristian in Torbay, Devon, in plain English. If your question isn't here, message me directly.
Four flat tiers in GBP: Standard £599/month, Growth £1,749/month, Dominator £3,599/month, Empire from £17,599/month (by application). Setup is £249/£999/£2,499 respectively for the first three, plus £499/branch and £199/brand for Empire. Setup is free for the first trade in your UK county. See the full pricing page.
We don't run an unguarded free trial because the platform is operator-onboarded. Instead, the discovery call (free), intake form (free), and 7-day build with preview link are all zero-cost up until the day you approve the go-live. If you walk away after seeing the preview, no money has changed hands.
Standard and Growth tiers carry a 30-day money-back guarantee — if you haven't booked 10 customers in your first 30 days live, full refund of setup and first month, no questions. Dominator tier is bespoke and refunds are negotiated on the call. Founders' Cohort customers also get this guarantee, in writing, in your contract.
Yes. One click from the dashboard. No phone call, no retention script, no exit fee. Your subscription ends at end of current month, and your data export is available for 90 days after.
A fair concern with a one-operator startup. Your data exports are held in an external escrow with AWS S3 Glacier; if OptitechAutomation goes dormant, the escrow releases full CSV/PDF dumps to every Founders' Cohort customer within 72 hours. The contract guarantees minimum 90 days of platform operation post-notification of any wind-down.
Yes. CP12 (Gas Safety Record), LGSR (Landlord Gas Safety Record) and gas-safe service records are built-in. You attach a photo, tag the Gas Safe registration number, and the certificate generates as a PDF with a unique URL the landlord can share with insurers. CP12 renewal reminders fire automatically 30 days before expiry.
Built in. EICR forms with the BS 7671 layout, photo evidence per circuit, signature on completion. Part P notification linked to the relevant Local Authority Building Control workflow. NICEIC certificate numbering tracked per engineer. The forms generate a PDF that's ready for direct upload to Elecsa / NICEIC.
Yes. Per-asset history, per-visit log of refrigerant added/removed, leak check records, and the F-Gas certificate number for the engineer. Exportable as a PDF auditor pack. Compatible with REFCOM's REAL Alternative system for company-level F-Gas certification.
Photo upload per visit, video reference logged against the job, customer report PDF auto-generated. WRc condition coding supported (not enforced — most drainage shops have their own grading). Jetting log per asset over time.
Yes. The worker mobile app is offline-first. Job notes, photos, signatures, certificates save locally and sync the moment signal returns. We test on TQ-area rural cellars and steel-frame commercials. There is no offline mode toggle — it just works.
Proper two-way sync from day one. Customers, invoices, payments, line items. Not a one-way export that needs reconciling, not a paid bolt-on. The integration uses Xero's official API and certified app status (in review at launch — provisional badge May 2026). QuickBooks Online also supported on request.
London (AWS eu-west-2). All customer data stays in the UK. We're ICO-registered, UK GDPR-compliant, and the Supabase database we run on is hosted in London. Backups go to a separate UK region (Manchester) on AWS S3 with daily snapshots.
Yes. Worker app is a Progressive Web App — installs from a browser on iOS 16+, Android 11+. Owner dashboard is browser-based and works on any modern desktop, tablet, or smartphone. No native iOS/Android download yet; PWA gets us 95% of the way.
API access is included on the Dominator tier. RESTful, OAuth2, documented at api.optitechautomation.co.uk/docs. Webhooks supported for booking-created, booking-completed, invoice-paid, no-show, and reliability-score-updated events.
The first 50 trades to go live on OptitechAutomation are the Founders' Cohort. They lock the founding prices for as long as their subscription stays active. Roughly 30 spots remain as of May 2026.
Because I (Cristian) personally onboard every Founders' Cohort customer. Past 50, I can't realistically maintain the bi-weekly business reviews and direct messaging promise we've made. We'll open a Founders' Cohort 2 at 51-100 with a slightly higher locked rate, and after that we move to production pricing.
If we're acquired by a US private equity firm, Founders' Cohort customers may cancel that day with a full pro-rata refund of the current month. This is in the pledge, in writing. The Founders' Cohort rate-lock survives ordinary changes of ownership (e.g. management buy-in, family transfer) but the cancel-and-refund clause activates on a PE acquisition specifically.
Roughly a weekend. Checkatrade's customer data export is limited (intentionally — they don't want you leaving), so we typically capture customers from your Xero contacts and SMS history rather than from Checkatrade itself. Reviews are scraped from your public Checkatrade page with your permission. Most shops are off-platform inside 7 days. Read the Checkatrade alternative page for details.
Both have CSV export. We import customers, jobs (last 12 months), and Xero-linked invoices in 24 hours. The slowest part is usually waiting for you to verify the customer list. See the Jobber alternative page.
2-4 days, depending on how customised your ServiceTitan instance is. ServiceTitan exports are technically complete but practically awkward — we extract via their API, normalise to our schema, and you validate. ServiceTitan UK alternative walks through the maths.
If the OptitechAutomation FAQ didn't answer your question, the discovery call is exactly where it should land. Twenty minutes, no sales script, no obligation. Cristian answers from Torbay, Devon.