The ServiceM8 alternative where the booking takes the deposit

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.

Two different meters

ServiceM8 counts jobs. Put a fifth engineer in a van and the subscription does not move, because paid plans carry unlimited users. Run a busier month and it can move, because the plan you need is the one that covers your job count. That suits a firm whose head count wanders and whose volume holds steady.

We count people. The Stage you sit on is set by how many are on the tools, and the booking figures on our pricing page are guidance rather than a cap. A heavy month does not push you up a Stage, and a new van inside your band does not either. Both meters are honest. They bill you for different things, so which one is kinder depends on the shape of your firm rather than on which of us is right.

The maths we lose, stated plainly

On subscription price alone ServiceM8 is under us at every volume on their page. Fifty jobs a month is £25 against our Start-up Stage at £199. Five hundred jobs is £119. Even their top published plan, £269 for 1,500 jobs or more with unlimited users, sits under our Standard Stage at £599. Verified 24 September 2026, servicem8.com/uk/pricing.

No arithmetic turns that around, so we are not going to try. If the monthly software line is the number the decision rests on, ServiceM8 wins this page and you should spend your evening on their site rather than ours. What follows is what the difference in price is buying, so you can judge whether it is worth it for your firm.

What they have that we do not

Accounting first, because it is the gap that costs you real time. ServiceM8 lists Xero, QuickBooks and MYOB on all of its plans (Verified 24 September 2026, servicem8.com/uk/pricing). We have no accounting integration. Nothing of ours syncs to Xero, QuickBooks or Sage, and nothing on this page should be read as a hint that it is coming. If your books run on one of those, someone will be keying our invoices in, or exporting our CSV and importing it at the other end. That is a real cost and it belongs here rather than in a surprise.

Compliance certificates next. We do not generate CP12, EICR or minor works certificates, and we will not pretend otherwise. Your Gas Safe registered engineer or your qualified electrician issues the certificate exactly as they do now, and what we hold is the document, the job record and the renewal date. If you want the platform itself to produce the certificate, that is a reason to look elsewhere.

A free run at it. ServiceM8 publishes a free plan at £0 for one user and 30 jobs a month, so a sole trader can use it without paying anything at all (Verified 24 September 2026, servicem8.com/uk/pricing). We have no free tier and no free trial. What we offer instead is a demo with the founder and a subscription that is not charged until you are live: your card is authorised when you confirm your setup and nothing is taken before your systems are running.

And the sum for a small team. With unlimited users on every paid plan, a growing crew costs ServiceM8 nothing extra per head, so for two or three people running fifty jobs a month their £25 is the sensible number and our £199 is not. Job-count and per-seat pricing are both kinder than ours at the small end. Ours starts to earn its keep when the office work, rather than the software bill, is the thing eating your week.

What the Stage price is buying

The booking page is the part that is structurally different. A customer picks a slot that is genuinely free and pays a card deposit at that exact moment, into your own Stripe account. The money never touches OptiTech Automation. The job reaches you confirmed and part paid rather than as an enquiry somebody has to chase.

Around it: auto-dispatch offering each job to the right worker with the owner keeping final say, the worker app that stays readable when signal drops, the invoice raised and emailed when a job completes with the VAT worked out, and every customer, job and payment exportable as CSV from your own settings page. Hiring inside your band does not raise the bill, and the step to the next Stage is a published number rather than a negotiation.

The bills that sit beside the plan

Two of our costs are not ours to charge you for, and you should know before you sign. Card payments run through your own Stripe account, so Stripe takes its fee from you directly. Text messages run through your own Twilio account, so Twilio bills you directly for what you send. Two extra accounts, two extra bills, and the money and the message history both stay with your business.

ServiceM8 keeps that simpler by charging 5p a message inside the plan (Verified 24 September 2026, servicem8.com/uk/pricing). Simpler is a fair word for it. Our reason for the other arrangement is that the card money, the customer relationship and the message trail belong to you rather than to us, which matters on the day you decide to leave.

One accountable founder, UK first

OptiTech Automation is run by one accountable UK founder, a sole trader, and built for UK trade firms and nobody else. UK GDPR compliant, ICO registered, EU hosted, pounds on every page. When you email, the person who built the platform answers, which is either the reassurance or the risk depending on what you value.

Terms are 30 day rolling with no exit fees, your data exports as CSV from your own settings page, and your card is authorised when you confirm your setup but not charged until you go live.