SmallTeamStack

Software stack for a construction or trades business

Three illustrative stacks, priced from rates read off each vendor's own page. At five people they run from $55 to $221.95 a month — and the expensive one is not the best one.

Typically 5–25 people · figures computed from the pricing tracker at build time · newest check

What shapes this business's software

Most of the team is not at a desk. Photos from site, invoices out fast, and software that works on a phone with poor signal. Per-seat pricing hurts here because the head-count is real.

The three stacks at a glance

Stack1351025
Lean $11$33$55$110$275
Practical $31.83$63.83$95.83$175.83$415.83
Feature-rich $113.95$155.95$221.95$386.95$857

Monthly, at the annual-billing rate, for the whole team.

Lean — $55/month at five people

The least you can pay and still run the business properly. Free tiers where they genuinely work.

Covered free:

  • Invoicing (Wave free tier)
  • Job tracking (Trello free, to 10 collaborators)

Deliberately not included at this size:

  • Anything billed per seat that office staff alone will use. Field crews rarely need a licence for software they open twice a month.
  • Desktop Office entirely. Almost nothing in this workflow needs installed Excel, and the cheapest Microsoft plan that includes it is $23.50 a user — on a team this size that is the single largest avoidable line.

Per person: $11/month · $660 a year for five people

Practical — $95.83/month at five people

What most teams this size actually end up on, once free tiers stop fitting.

Deliberately not included at this size:

  • A CRM, while work comes from repeat customers and referrals.
  • Dedicated storage — but watch the 30 GB pooled limit if crews upload site photos, because that is exactly the thing that fills it.

Per person: $19.17/month · $1,149.96 a year for five people

Feature-rich — $221.95/month at five people

More capability, and more cost. Not an upgrade — a different trade, and often the wrong one at this size.

Deliberately not included at this size:

  • Scheduling software aimed at meetings — job scheduling is a different category with trade-specific vendors.

Per person: $44.39/month · $2,663.40 a year for five people

The thing generic stack advice misses here

Site photos are the thing that breaks the lean stack, and they break it quietly. Google Business Starter gives 30 GB pooled per person covering Drive and Gmail together; a crew uploading daily progress photos will reach that far faster than an office of the same size. Standard at 2 TB is usually the right call before it becomes urgent.

What this page is not

A recommendation. We have not run most of these products in a lab, and two businesses of the same type and size can have genuinely different right answers — the variable that matters most is how your team actually works, which no table can see. These are priced illustrations, good for checking whether your bill is in a sane range and for seeing what a tier deliberately leaves out.

To price what you actually pay for rather than an illustration, the stack auditor takes your real list and flags overlap, seat-minimum waste and what happens when somebody leaves. If your bill is well above the feature-rich row, the cause is usually paying twice for a capability you already own rather than one expensive mistake.

Other business types

Tell me when these prices change

Every figure on this page is recomputed when a tracked rate moves. Subscribers hear what changed, with the date and the source.