ServiceTitan vs Tradify: Onboarding Fees for HVAC Contractors

Neither vendor publishes an onboarding fee. ServiceTitan shows no prices at all, only Request Pricing buttons on three packages. Tradify publishes $47, $51 and $61 USD per user per month and lists no setup charge. So the honest comparison is: one known subscription cost, one unknown total, and arithmetic showing how much an undisclosed fee can move the answer.

Key points

• Tradify publishes three per user rates, $47, $51 and $61 USD per user per month, appearing in the order Lite, Pro, Plus, plus a 14 day free trial.
• ServiceTitan publishes no dollar figure anywhere on its pricing page: all three packages carry a Request Pricing button, and no onboarding, implementation or training fee is stated.
• Five Tradify users cost $2,820 to $3,660 per year depending on plan, before any add-on.
• A $5,000 one-off onboarding fee spread over 12 months across 5 technicians is $83.33 per technician per month, more than Tradify’s highest published rate on its own.
• Everything in the tables below is computed from the two pricing pages listed in the sources block. No third-party figure is used.

What do the two vendors actually publish?

ServiceTitan publishes packages, not prices. The pricing page names Essentials (“Streamline your operations with industry-leading features”) and The Works (“Accelerate your growth with the full ServiceTitan suite”), alongside a third package block with the same feature list. Each ends in Request Pricing. The page states that “our per-technician pricing is designed to fit your business and goals, at any size” and claims a “+15% average yearly increase in revenue”, but attaches no rate to any package. There is an Onboarding link in the site footer; the pricing page itself sets no onboarding price.

Tradify publishes rates. Its page lists a free trial that “includes all the features”, then three plan blocks: Tradify Lite, Tradify Pro and Tradify Plus. The dollar figures on the page appear as $47 USD per user/month, $51 USD per user/month and $61 USD per user/month, with SmartTools described as “Available on our Plus plan only” next to the $47 line. A separate “$12 per month” line repeats several times without a clearly attached product. Confirm the mapping in a quote before you budget from it.

What does Tradify cost at every crew size?

Straight multiplication of the published per user rates. No annual discount is applied because the pricing page does not state one.

Users	Lite $47/mo	Pro $51/mo	Plus $61/mo	Lite / year	Pro / year	Plus / year
1	$47	$51	$61	$564	$612	$732
2	$94	$102	$122	$1,128	$1,224	$1,464
3	$141	$153	$183	$1,692	$1,836	$2,196
4	$188	$204	$244	$2,256	$2,448	$2,928
5	$235	$255	$305	$2,820	$3,060	$3,660
6	$282	$306	$366	$3,384	$3,672	$4,392
8	$376	$408	$488	$4,512	$4,896	$5,856
10	$470	$510	$610	$5,640	$6,120	$7,320
12	$564	$612	$732	$6,768	$7,344	$8,784
15	$705	$765	$915	$8,460	$9,180	$10,980
20	$940	$1,020	$1,220	$11,280	$12,240	$14,640

The working, line by line, for a 5 user shop on Plus:

• $61 per user per month × 5 users = $305 per month
• $305 × 12 months = $3,660 per year
• Per user per year: $61 × 12 = $732

Plan step costs, which is the number most people want and nobody tabulates:

Step	Extra per user/mo	Extra per user/yr	At 5 users/yr	At 10 users/yr
Lite to Pro	$4	$48	$240	$480
Pro to Plus	$10	$120	$600	$1,200
Lite to Plus	$14	$168	$840	$1,680

An HVAC shop with ten logins pays $1,680 a year to sit on Plus rather than Lite. If SmartTools, which the page restricts to Plus, does not save that much administrative time, the step is not worth taking.

How much does an unpublished onboarding fee add per month?

This is the reverse calculation. You cannot compare a fee you have not been told, but you can work out what any quoted fee would do to your monthly cost, then check the quote against it.

Formula: fee ÷ amortisation months ÷ technicians = added cost per technician per month.

Assumptions stated up front: the fee is a single up-front charge, no finance cost is applied, and headcount stays flat across the period.

One-off fee	Over 12 mo, 5 techs	Over 24 mo, 5 techs	Over 36 mo, 5 techs
$1,000	$16.67	$8.33	$5.56
$2,500	$41.67	$20.83	$13.89
$5,000	$83.33	$41.67	$27.78
$7,500	$125.00	$62.50	$41.67
$10,000	$166.67	$83.33	$55.56
$15,000	$250.00	$125.00	$83.33

Working for the $5,000 row: $5,000 ÷ 12 = $416.67 per month for the business; $416.67 ÷ 5 technicians = $83.33 per technician per month. Over 36 months: $5,000 ÷ 36 = $138.89 ÷ 5 = $27.78.

Read that against Tradify’s published $61 Plus rate. A $5,000 fee, judged over a first year, is worth more per technician per month than Tradify’s most expensive published plan. Judged over three years it is worth less than half of it. Same fee, opposite conclusion, and the only thing that changed is how long you assume you will stay.

Headcount moves it just as hard:

One-off fee	3 techs, 12 mo	5 techs, 12 mo	8 techs, 12 mo	15 techs, 12 mo
$2,500	$69.44	$41.67	$26.04	$13.89
$5,000	$138.89	$83.33	$52.08	$27.78
$10,000	$277.78	$166.67	$104.17	$55.56

A fixed implementation charge is regressive: the three-van shop carries roughly five times the per technician load of the fifteen-van shop for the identical piece of work.

What quoted rate would make ServiceTitan cost the same as Tradify?

ServiceTitan publishes no rate, so this is written as a sensitivity table across plausible quote levels rather than a claim about what ServiceTitan charges. Both axes vary: the quoted per technician monthly rate, and the one-off fee. All figures are first-year cost per technician at 5 technicians.

First-year cost per technician = (quoted rate × 12) + (fee ÷ 5)

Quoted rate/tech/mo	Fee $0	Fee $2,500	Fee $5,000	Fee $10,000
$100	$1,200	$1,700	$2,200	$3,200
$150	$1,800	$2,300	$2,800	$3,800
$200	$2,400	$2,900	$3,400	$4,400
$250	$3,000	$3,500	$4,000	$5,000
$300	$3,600	$4,100	$4,600	$5,600
$400	$4,800	$5,300	$5,800	$6,800

Tradify’s first-year cost per user, from the published rates, is $564 on Lite, $612 on Pro and $732 on Plus. Every cell in the table above is a multiple of those. The break-even question is therefore not about price at all. It is about whether the heavier product generates enough additional revenue per technician per year to cover the gap. ServiceTitan’s own pricing page claims “+15% average yearly increase in revenue” without publishing the basis for that figure, so it cannot be used as an input here.

The reverse form of the same table is more useful when you get a quote. To match Tradify Plus at $732 per user per year, a quoted per technician rate plus amortised fee must total $61 per month. At a $2,500 fee across 5 techs over 12 months, $41.67 of that $61 is already gone before a single subscription dollar, leaving $19.33 per technician per month. No published evidence suggests such a rate exists.

Three-year totals, since fees only make sense over a contract

Scenario, 5 users	Year 1	Year 2	Year 3	3-year total
Tradify Lite	$2,820	$2,820	$2,820	$8,460
Tradify Pro	$3,060	$3,060	$3,060	$9,180
Tradify Plus	$3,660	$3,660	$3,660	$10,980
Quote at $150/tech + $5,000 fee	$14,000	$9,000	$9,000	$32,000
Quote at $250/tech + $5,000 fee	$20,000	$15,000	$15,000	$50,000

Working for the $150 row: $150 × 5 techs × 12 months = $9,000, plus the $5,000 fee in year one = $14,000. Years two and three carry no fee. The two quote rows are illustrations at rates ServiceTitan has not published; they are there so you can slot your own quote into the same arithmetic. Tradify rows use published rates and assume no price change, which the page does not guarantee.

Two misconceptions worth correcting with numbers

“The onboarding fee is the small part.” At 5 technicians, a $10,000 fee amortised over one year is $166.67 per technician per month. Tradify’s whole Plus plan is $61. The fee is 2.7 times the alternative product’s entire price. It is only small relative to a long committed term, and a term you have not signed is not a term you have.

“Per technician pricing means the office is free.” ServiceTitan’s page states per technician pricing; it does not state that dispatchers, estimators or owners are excluded from billing, and no seat definition appears on the page. Tradify bills per user, which is explicit. For a shop with 5 field staff and 3 office logins, that is 8 Tradify users: $376, $408 or $488 per month rather than the 5 user figures of $235, $255 or $305. The difference between assuming 5 and paying for 8 on Plus is $2,196 a year.

When these estimates are wrong

• Annual billing. Tradify’s page shows monthly per user rates and no annual discount. If a discount exists off-page, every yearly column above is too high.
• The $12 per month line. It appears repeatedly in the Tradify pricing content without a clear attachment. If it is a per-company add-on, add $144 a year. If it is per user, at 5 users that is $720 a year and the plan-step table understates the gap.
• Currency and region. Tradify states USD and lists a Wilmington, Delaware address. Rates elsewhere may differ.
• Data migration. Neither page prices importing customer records, price books or job history. On an HVAC price book with thousands of line items, this is often the largest single implementation line and it sits outside every table here.
• Payment processing. ServiceTitan lists Payments, Integrated Financing and Accounts Payable products; Tradify lists Online Payments and Stripe. Neither page states a processing rate, so card fees on your card volume are excluded from every figure above.
• Headcount change. Every per technician figure assumes flat staffing. Seasonal HVAC hiring changes both the per user subscription and the per head fee amortisation in the same month.

What could not be verified

• ServiceTitan’s price for any package. All three show Request Pricing.
• ServiceTitan’s onboarding, implementation, training or data migration fees. None appear on the pricing page.
• Whether ServiceTitan enforces a minimum technician count or a minimum contract term.
• What Tradify’s repeated “$12 per month” refers to.
• Whether Tradify’s plan names map to $47, $51 and $61 in that exact order. The scraped page interleaves the SmartTools note with the first figure.
• Any contract length or termination terms for either vendor.

We do not use either product. Everything above is a record of what the two pricing pages published on 2026-08-23, plus arithmetic on those figures.

What to check before you buy

1. Ask for the onboarding fee as a single number in writing, and ask what it covers: configuration, price book import, historical job data, training hours.
2. Ask what happens to the fee if you leave in month four. A refundable or pro-rated fee changes every amortisation row above.
3. Ask for the seat definition. Are office staff, apprentices and part-time technicians billed?
4. Confirm the minimum term. The 36 month column only applies if you are genuinely willing to be there in 36 months.
5. Put your own quote into the formula in this article: (rate × 12) + (fee ÷ headcount), then compare against $732 per user per year, which is Tradify’s published Plus rate annualised.
6. Use Tradify’s 14 day free trial, which its page says includes all features, to find out whether the cheaper plan is actually short of anything you need before paying for the more expensive one.
7. Get the payment processing rate in writing from both. It is absent from both pricing pages and it scales with revenue, not headcount.

Read next

• Cheapest ServiceTitan Setup for a Small HVAC Shop
• FieldPulse vs ServiceTitan: Cost for a 25-Person HVAC Team
• ServiceTitan True Cost After Onboarding Fees and Add-Ons
• HVAC Business Software: Every Published Price Compared

Also worth reading: Buildertrend vs Tradify: Which Costs Less for Remodelers

Also worth reading: Cheapest Tradify Setup for a Solo Tradesman

Also worth reading: Tradify: What the Base Plan Leaves Out

Also worth reading: Tradify Pricing for a 5-Person HVAC Shop