FieldPulse vs Kickserv: Which Plan Unlocks GPS Tracking

Neither vendor sells “GPS tracking” as a named add-on. FieldPulse’s pricing page states that its field-only seats include “clock in and out with location tracking,” which ties location tracking to a seat type rather than a plan tier. Kickserv’s pricing page lists time tracking and expense tracking on all three of its plans but does not use the words GPS or location tracking anywhere in its published feature list.

That difference in structure is itself a trade-off worth naming up front. FieldPulse’s model means a buyer cannot compare exact dollar costs without first talking to sales, but in exchange the vendor claims pricing flexes to the size of the crew. Kickserv’s model publishes exact numbers a buyer can act on immediately, but those numbers are locked into three fixed blocks of users, so a crew that does not land exactly on 5, 10, or 20 people either pays for unused seats or is turned away at the tier’s ceiling.

What each vendor actually publishes

FieldPulse does not list dollar amounts on its pricing page. It describes itself as seat-based, with two seat types: full-access seats, which cover “the complete platform: scheduling, dispatching, customer management, invoicing, estimates, pricebook, reporting, and more,” and field-only seats, described as being “for team members who work exclusively from the mobile app” who “can view their assigned jobs, see job details and notes, upload files, and clock in and out with location tracking.” The page names three packages, Professional, and an Enterprise tier described as “line and license-based pricing,” but every tier ends in a “Request Pricing” button rather than a number. See FieldPulse’s pricing page for the exact wording.

Kickserv, by contrast, lists three named plans with fixed monthly prices and fixed user counts baked into each tier:

Plan	Users included	Monthly price	Per-user cost at list price
Start	5	$60/mo	$12.00
Run	10	$119/mo	$11.90
Scale	20	$199/mo	$9.95

All three figures, including the “Save 20% with annual subscription” note, come from Kickserv’s pricing page. Kickserv does not sell single seats the way FieldPulse describes doing; a contractor buys one of the three named blocks and gets the number of users listed with it.

The arithmetic on team size

Because Kickserv sells in fixed blocks rather than per-seat, a contractor cannot simply pick 1, 3, 5 or 8 users and get a matching price. Here is what the published tiers mean for common crew sizes:

• 1 user: still lands on the Start plan, since Kickserv publishes no smaller tier. A solo contractor pays the full $60/mo for a 5-user block and uses one seat, which works out to $60.00 per active user — five times the effective per-user rate a 5-person crew gets on the same plan.
• 1-3 users: the smallest available Kickserv plan is Start, at 5 users for $60/mo. A 3-person crew pays the same $60/mo as a 5-person crew, since Kickserv does not publish a smaller tier. Effective cost per active user at 3 people is $20.00/mo, nearly double the $12.00 rate a full 5-person crew gets for the identical $60/mo charge.
• 5 users: exactly fits Start at $60/mo, or $12.00 per user.
• 8 users: exceeds Start’s 5-user limit, so an 8-person crew has to move up to Run, at 10 users for $119/mo. Two of those 10 seats go unused at that headcount, working out to $14.88/mo per user actually staffed, though the published per-seat rate on the Run tier itself is $11.90.
• 20 users: fits Scale at $199/mo exactly, or $9.95 per user, the lowest published per-user rate of the three tiers.

The break points between tiers are worth spelling out too. A crew of 6 to 10 people must sit on the Run plan at $119/mo regardless of whether it staffs 6, 7, 8, 9, or all 10 seats — so a 6-person crew pays $19.83 per active user on Run, more than double what a 5-person crew pays on Start, purely because it crossed the 5-seat ceiling by one person. The same pattern repeats between Run and Scale: an 11-person crew must move to the 20-user Scale block at $199/mo, working out to $18.09 per active user, even though Scale’s published per-seat rate at full capacity is $9.95.

FieldPulse cannot be run through this same arithmetic. Nothing on its pricing page states what a full-access seat or a field-only seat costs, so there is no published per-seat number to multiply against 1, 3, 5 or 8 users.

Annual vs. monthly totals on Kickserv

Kickserv’s page states subscribers “Save 20% with annual subscription.” Applying that 20% figure to each tier’s monthly price gives the following full-year totals:

Plan	Monthly billing (×12)	Annual billing (20% off, ×12)	Annual savings
Start	$720.00	$576.00	$144.00
Run	$1,428.00	$1,142.40	$285.60
Scale	$2,388.00	$1,910.40	$477.60

At an effective monthly rate, that puts annual-billed Start at $48/mo, annual-billed Run at $95.20/mo, and annual-billed Scale at $159.20/mo — each roughly a fifth cheaper than paying month to month, consistent with the 20% figure Kickserv publishes. None of these figures appear verbatim on Kickserv’s page; they are arithmetic applied to the $60, $119, $199, and 20% numbers that do.

The Kickback discount, worked through

Kickserv’s page describes a loyalty discount it calls Kickback: “Start, Run, Scale, and Premium users will receive a 5% discount on their monthly fees” if they process a stated minimum in online payments each month. The minimums by plan, as published, are:

Plan	Monthly minimum processing	Discount
Start	$1,000	5% off
Run	$2,000	5% off
Scale	$3,000	5% off

Applied to list prices: a Start subscriber who processes at least $1,000/month in payments through Kickserv saves 5% of $60, or $3/mo, bringing the effective price to $57/mo. A Run subscriber processing at least $2,000/month saves 5% of $119, or $5.95/mo, bringing the effective price to $113.05/mo. A Scale subscriber processing at least $3,000/month saves 5% of $199, or $9.95/mo, bringing the effective price to $189.05/mo. Stacked across a full year, those monthly savings add up to $36.00 for Start, $71.40 for Run, and $119.40 for Scale — on top of whatever is saved by choosing annual billing over monthly. The page also notes that for annual subscribers, “the monthly minimum processing volume is multiplied by 12,” meaning the volume test is applied across the full year rather than month by month, which gives an annual subscriber more flexibility to hit the target in uneven months rather than needing to clear the minimum every single month.

What could not be verified

• FieldPulse’s actual price: the page states it is seat-based and “customized to your team size and setup,” but no full-access or field-only seat price appears anywhere on the page. Anyone comparing total cost against Kickserv would need to request a quote first.
• Whether Kickserv’s plans include GPS or location tracking at all: the word “GPS” and the phrase “location tracking” do not appear in the Kickserv source text supplied above. Time tracking and expense tracking are listed, but whether that time tracking includes a GPS or map component is not stated on the pricing page itself.
• Which FieldPulse tier, if any, restricts location tracking to field-only seats only: the page ties location tracking to the field-only seat type in its FAQ answer, but does not say whether full-access seats also get it, or whether it is available on every package.
• Payment processing fees: Kickserv’s page mentions online payments in the context of the Kickback discount but does not publish a processing fee percentage or per-transaction cost. FieldPulse’s page does not mention payment processing fees at all in the source reviewed.

What to check before buying

1. Ask FieldPulse sales for the specific dollar rate on both full-access and field-only seats, and confirm in writing whether location tracking is limited to field-only seats or included platform-wide.
2. Ask Kickserv sales to confirm, in writing, whether GPS or location tracking is part of the time tracking feature on any plan, since the published page does not use either term.
3. If a crew size does not land exactly on Kickserv’s 5, 10 or 20-user blocks, get a written quote for the next tier up, since unused seats are paid for at full price under the published structure. As the arithmetic above shows, crossing a tier boundary by even one person can nearly double the effective per-user cost.
4. Confirm the Kickback discount’s monthly processing minimum against expected card volume before assuming the 5% will apply, and ask whether annual billing’s “multiplied by 12” rule genuinely gives more room to miss a slow month.
5. For tax treatment of software subscriptions and payment processing fees as business expenses, the IRS site is the primary source, not a vendor page.

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• Which Field Service Software Actually Publishes Its Pricing
• Cheapest Field Service Software for a One-Person Business
• General Contractor Software: What Each Vendor Charges

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