What Business Software Actually Costs in 2026 — And Who Still Won't Tell You

Here is the short answer. A one-person trade business running Jobber pays $49 a month for the entry tier and $29 a month for every additional person who touches the schedule. Housecall Pro's mid-tier is $189 a month for five users and $100 a month for each user after that. A single-location dental practice on Open Dental pays $199 a month per location for its first year, then $149. And ServiceTitan, Workiz, Dentrix, Curve Dental, Denticon and Clover publish no price at all — you have to ask a salesperson. Every figure in this piece was read off the vendor's own pricing page in August 2026, and every one is linked.

//Field service and the trades

Two things in that table are worth more than the headline numbers. The first is that Jobber defines a user as anyone who opens the account to view or manage the schedule — office or field. So the price of your software is a function of how many people you employ, which means every hire quietly raises it. Five field staff on Jobber Core is $49 plus four times $29, or $165 a month, for the tier that advertises at $49.

The second is that Service Fusion charges nothing per user at any tier — unlimited users on all three plans. Its entry price is five times Jobber's, which looks worse until you have eleven people, at which point it is cheaper. Neither vendor is being dishonest. They are pricing for different-shaped businesses, and the shape of yours decides which one is expensive.

One caution if you go and look. Jobber's page currently leads with promotional annual pricing — Core displays as $21/mo, with the fine print reading “then $29/mo,” new customers only, offer ending 31 August. The $49 above is the standing monthly list price, which is the number that survives the promotion.

//Dental practice software

Open Dental is the only one of the four major vendors that publishes a rate. It is $199 per month per location for the first twelve months, then $149, covering every computer at that location for up to three providers. Additional providers are $20 a month each. Hygienists are not counted.

The structure matters more than the number. Support is not optional — it is required to keep using most add-on services, and the fee page states that if you stop support and later resume, any discounts earned are lost and the published rate applies. That published rate moves: Open Dental raised the US initial rate from $179 to $199 on 2 February 2026, an 11.2% increase. And the reduced second-year rate is defined as whatever is published on the day you reach month thirteen — so it floats with future pricing rather than locking at the number you signed up under.

Add-ons are separate and priced per location per month: the eServices bundle is $165, web scheduling for recall is $75, new-patient web scheduling is another $75, secure email $30, AI image analysis $149. A practice using the common set is paying multiples of the base fee.

Dentrix Ascend, Curve Dental and Denticon publish nothing. Curve's page is titled “Affordable & Transparent Pricing” and contains no price, no per-provider rate, no setup fee and no contract length — only a form.

//Restaurants, where the software fee is the small number

On $80,000 a month of card-present sales, the gap between Square's free tier and Premium is 0.2% of revenue — $160 a month — against a $149 subscription. The subscription is close to free at that volume and expensive below it. The processing rate, not the software fee, is what a restaurant is actually buying.

Two changes in the last year are worth knowing about, both documented by Square itself. The standard card-present rate went from 2.6% + 10¢ to 2.6% + 15¢, with grandfathering for qualifying existing sellers that expired on 31 December 2025. And in October 2025 Square repackaged eighteen à-la-carte subscriptions into three tiers — which also moved the better processing rate behind a paid plan.

Toast publishes software tiers starting at $69 a month but no per-terminal fee — it says only that “additional charges apply for subsequent devices” — and no processing rate at all. Its payments page states that rates are built per business. Clover publishes nothing readable; its site renders prices client-side and its promotional site quotes “starting at 1¢/month” behind a four-step lead form. Any specific Toast or Clover rate you find online comes from a review site, not the vendor.

//Prices go up, and faster than everything else

Vertice put SaaS inflation at 16.4% in June 2026 — the highest monthly rate it has recorded, and close to four times US CPI. Its 2026 index reported 13.2% across 2025. Zylo's 2026 index found 78% of IT leaders hit by unexpected charges from consumption or AI-based pricing, and 61% cutting projects to absorb unplanned software cost increases.

Be careful with those numbers, including here. They are drawn from organisations large enough to buy software-management platforms, not from plumbing companies and dental practices. They tell you the direction of travel in business software pricing. They are not a benchmark for a twelve-person business, and anyone presenting them as one is misreading their own source.

//What this data does not contain

There is no reliable published figure for what a genuinely small US service business — under fifty people — spends on software per year. Every dataset that exists samples companies with IT departments. Zylo's smallest published band is 1–500 employees, averaging $11.5M a year across 152 applications, which is not a number that describes anyone reading this.

We also could not verify a single primary-source price increase at Jobber, Housecall Pro, ServiceTitan, Workiz or Toast between 2024 and 2026. Comparison blogs assert them freely and cite nothing. The two documented increases in this piece — Square's and Open Dental's — are documented because both vendors published them.

//The pattern worth noticing

Of eleven vendors checked, five publish no price whatsoever. Of the six that do, the headline figure is the beginning of the bill rather than the bill: extra users, extra locations, extra devices, add-on modules, and a processing rate in the restaurant case. And the two documented price changes both moved in the same direction and both narrowed what the old rate covered.

None of that makes these bad products. They are good products, and for a great many businesses renting one is exactly the right decision. But renting is what it is: a recurring cost that scales with your headcount, your locations and your revenue, set by someone else, and revisable by them.

The alternative is owning the system instead of renting it — a fixed cost once, no per-seat fee, no tier that moves. That is what gets built here — a $500 teardown credited against a $6,500 core build — and the price is on the site rather than behind a form. You can click through a working system for your industry before speaking to anyone.