ServiceTitan, Jobber, or something built for you?

If you are reading this you have probably already sat through a demo or two. The products look good in a demo. That is what a demo is for, and it is not a criticism — ServiceTitan and Jobber are real software, built by people who understand this industry, and for a lot of businesses one of them is the right answer. I sell the third option, so treat everything below with the scepticism that deserves. What I can do is be straight about which situation you are actually in, including the ones where you should close this tab and go book the demo. ## What are you actually choosing between? Not features. Every one of these tools does quoting, scheduling and invoicing, and if you compare feature lists you will end up choosing on a checkbox that turns out not to matter. The real choice is structural, and there are two parts to it. **Renting versus owning.** Field service platforms are subscriptions, usually priced per user per month. That is a cost that grows with your crew and never stops. A build is paid once and then it is yours — but you own it in the way you own a van, which means it is also your problem. Neither of those is automatically better. Renting buys you somebody else's maintenance, somebody else's security patches, and somebody else's support desk. That is worth real money and I would not pretend otherwise. **Bending versus fitting.** A product is built for the general case, which means it is built for the shape most businesses in your trade have. If your business has that shape, the product fits and you get years of value for a monthly fee. If your business makes its money from something slightly unusual, you will spend those years working around the software. ## When is the off-the-shelf product the right answer? More often than a custom-software person is supposed to admit. **When you want it working next week.** A subscription is live on Monday. A build takes weeks. If the bleeding is happening now, stop the bleeding. **When your operation looks like the standard shape.** Calls come in, jobs get dispatched to techs, work gets invoiced. If that describes you without any "except", the product was designed for you and you should use it. **When you are growing headcount fast.** Per-seat pricing gets criticised, but if each seat is a person generating revenue, the cost scales with the thing paying for it. That is a reasonable trade. **When you do not want to own software.** This is a legitimate preference and not a failure of nerve. Owning a system means deciding when it changes and who maintains it. Plenty of good operators would rather that were someone else's job, and they are not wrong. If two or more of those describe you, go and buy the subscription. You do not need me and I would rather say so now than after you have paid. ## When does it stop fitting? There is one tell that is worth more than the rest, and you can check it today. **Do you export into a spreadsheet to do the actual work?** If the real job — the pricing, the crew planning, the reconciliation, the owner report — happens in a spreadsheet after the software has been consulted, then the software is not running your business. It is a place you type things before doing the work somewhere else. That gap never closes on its own, because the product cannot add a feature for the specific thing that makes you different. Two lesser signals. You are paying for a tier you outgrew, where the next tier up is clearly priced for a company much larger than yours. Or you have a workflow — a particular kind of job, a partner who sends work in a particular format, a way you bill that is not how anyone else bills — and every conversation about it ends with "the software doesn't really do that." ## What do you give up by going custom? The real answer, not the flattering one. **There is no support desk.** JAK Labs is one engineer. There is no team, no overnight rota, and no phone number that reaches a stranger who can help at eleven on a Saturday. A subscription gives you that and I cannot. **There is a continuity question and you should ask it.** If I am unavailable, what happens to the thing your business runs on? My answer is that you own the code outright, it runs in your own cloud account rather than mine, and it is documented so another engineer can pick it up. That is a real mitigation and it is not the same as a company with staff. Any custom developer who waves this question away is not being straight with you. **It takes longer to start.** Weeks, not Monday. ## So how would I decide? If your operation fits the standard shape and you want it running next week, buy the subscription. That is not a consolation prize, it is the right call. If the actual work has migrated into a spreadsheet, or the thing you make money from is the thing the software cannot model, then a build is worth pricing. I do those from $6,000, and I run my own handyman business — $216K invoiced — on exactly the sort of system I would build for you, which means I have to live with the decisions I sell. ## Before either, the cheaper question Whichever way you decide, the software is downstream of something simpler: whether the customer could reach you at all. It is a strange thing to fix after choosing an operations platform, and it costs nothing to check. **[Run the free website check](/website-audit)** — thirty seconds, no signup, no email address. It opens your site the way a customer's phone does and tells you what they actually meet. And if you want help deciding between the three options with someone looking at your actual operation, that is the free 30-minute Operations Audit. [Tell me about your business](/contact). If the answer is that you should go and buy Jobber, that is what I will tell you.