The Checkatrade alternative that publishes its pricing

The price, in three lines

Standard is £599 a month, covering up to fifteen on the tools.

The one-off Onboarding Investment on Standard is £249. The first ten firms pay no Onboarding Investment, on any Stage.

Your card is authorised when you confirm your setup. Nothing is charged until you are live, after our review.

A lead marketplace and a booking platform are different machines

Checkatrade exists to introduce you to homeowners. You pay to be visible, the enquiry arrives, and you chase it alongside other trades who received the same kind of enquiry. When the job ends, the profile, the reviews and the relationship largely live on their platform, not yours.

OptiTech Automation is the other machine. It assumes the customer has already found you, through your reputation, your van, your referrals or your own site. Its job is to turn that attention into a confirmed, deposit-paid booking without you touching the phone. We are not a lead marketplace, and we never promise leads or rankings. We are the system that runs the work you win.

What booking-first means in practice

On a lead marketplace, and on most trade software, work arrives as an enquiry. Someone fills a form or rings, you call back, you quote, you wait, you invoice, you chase. Every step is a place where the job can die or the deposit can go unasked for.

On OptiTech Automation the customer picks a real slot on your booking page and pays a deposit at that exact moment. The deposit is taken automatically, by card, into your own Stripe account. The money never touches OptiTech Automation. By the time you hear about the job it is already booked, already part-paid, and already offered to the right member of your team.

The cost that never appears on an invoice

The marketplace model carries a quiet cost: the enquiries you pay to compete for and do not win. Every owner who has used a lead marketplace knows the feeling of paying for an enquiry that other firms are chasing at the same time.

We charge one plan fee, £599 a month on Standard, whatever your enquiry volume does. A busy month does not cost more. A quiet month does not punish you twice. And a customer who books through your own page this year can book again next year without anyone paying for the introduction a second time. That repeat booking is the whole point of owning the page.

Built for the owner with a team

Our centre is the UK trade business of any size up to 90 workers. The owner who is still quoting at nine at night because the office work never made it off their shoulders.

That is why the price is a plan, not a meter on every hire. Within Standard, up to fifteen on the tools, adding a van or an apprentice does not raise the bill, and the step to Growth at £1,749 for bigger teams is published like everything else. The worker app, the auto-dispatch engine and the invoice raised on completion are all in the plan. Features are never sold back to you one by one.

What the plan fee actually buys

Everything in this paragraph is included in Standard at £599 a month. The booking page your customers book real slots on. The deposit engine that takes a card payment at the moment of booking, into your own Stripe account. The auto-dispatch engine that offers each job to the right worker while you keep final say. The worker app your team runs the day from, which stays readable when signal drops. The invoice raised and emailed to the customer when a job completes, VAT worked out. And the record of every customer, job and payment in one place, exportable as CSV from your own settings page.

There is no per-lead meter running underneath any of it. The bill in month twelve is the bill from month one, whatever your enquiry volume did in between. And if the team grows past fifteen on the tools, the step to Growth at £1,749 is published too, so even the growth path holds no surprise.

Run them side by side before you decide

You do not have to cancel anything to try this. Plenty of owners keep a marketplace membership while their own booking page takes over the repeat and referral work. Watch where the profitable jobs come from for a couple of months, then decide with your own numbers, not ours.

For the record: we are UK GDPR compliant, ICO registered and EU-hosted, and the whole platform is run by one accountable UK founder. When you email, the person who built it answers.

What they have that we do not

Start with the frame, because this block is not a takedown. Checkatrade sells leads. We run the diary. An owner can sensibly keep both, and plenty do: the marketplace fills a quiet week, your own booking page takes the repeat and referral work, and neither one cancels the other out.

So the first thing they have that we do not is the thing a directory exists for, a stream of homeowners who have never heard of you. We never promise leads and we never promise rankings. If next week is empty, a marketplace can do something about it and we cannot.

Then the gaps that are ours wherever you compare us. We have no accounting integration: nothing of ours syncs to Xero, QuickBooks or Sage, and nothing here should be read as a hint that one is coming. Your invoices are raised and emailed when a job completes and your records export as CSV, so the figures reach your books by hand or by import.

We do not generate compliance certificates. Your Gas Safe registered engineer or your qualified electrician issues the CP12, the EICR or the minor works certificate exactly as they do now, and what we keep is the document, the job record and the renewal date.

And we run no free trial. You get a demo with the founder and a subscription that is not charged until you go live, with the card authorised when you confirm your setup. On price, a platform that charges per seat is the lower bill for a one or two person firm, and a marketplace with no monthly fee can look lower still until you add up a year of lead charges. Both sums are yours to run, and the worth-it calculator does ours in about two minutes.