Mark was standing in the load space of his silver Ford Transit Custom parked outside an electrical trade counter off Days Road in St Philips, Bristol. The autumn rain was drumming hard against the roof rack where two bundles of 25mm PVC conduit were strapped down alongside a three-stage aluminium ladder. It was ten to five on a Thursday afternoon. Mark had his phone balanced on the steering wheel, squinting through steamed-up windows at a PDF direct debit statement from Tradify.
He was paying thirty-nine pounds plus VAT for himself, thirty-nine pounds for Tom, his senior sparky, and thirty-nine pounds for young Harvey, their second-year apprentice. That came to one hundred and seventeen pounds plus VAT every month, pulling £140.40 out of his Lloyds business account on the first of the month. Harvey barely touched the app other than checking where the van needed to be at eight in the morning and clicking the green button to log his hours. Yet Tradify charged Mark the exact same thirty-nine quid for an apprentice learning how to pull cable as it did for an approved electrician running a commercial site.
What made Mark curse under his breath, however, was what had happened at two o'clock that afternoon while he was head-first inside a crawl space underneath a Victorian terrace in Clifton. A private landlord with four student HMO properties in Redland called his mobile number. One of the main 30mA RCDs on a split-load consumer unit had tripped out, cutting power to the fridge and heating during freshers week.
Mark was lying on his side across cold ceiling joists with a torch between his teeth, his hands covered in eighty years of soot and plaster dust. He could not reach into his Snickers work trousers to answer the phone. The phone rang out six times, clicked over to a generic O2 voicemail, and went silent. The landlord hung up after three seconds without leaving a message. Two minutes later, that same landlord dialled another local electrical contractor found on Google Maps. That firm ran an automated missed call text-back system paired with an autonomous front desk. Within four seconds, an automated message landed on the landlord's WhatsApp, asked for a picture of the tripped fuse board, confirmed an emergency diagnostic callout rate of £160 plus VAT, and collected a £50 card deposit while Mark was still crawling back toward the floorboard hatch.
By the time Mark brushed the dust off his trousers, boiled the kettle, and checked his call logs at half past five, the emergency job was already booked, invoiced, and paid for by a competitor. Tradify kept his calendar tidy once work was booked, but did nothing to stop paying customers walking out the door while his hands were full. Linking Tradify to an automated missed call text-back workflow and our Tradify WhatsApp integration is how independent trades stop losing high-margin emergency jobs.
⚡ Key Takeaways
- Tradify charges £29 to £39 plus VAT per user every month, forcing you to pay full price for apprentices who only check job postcodes.
- Adding subcontractors or extra vans during busy summer months multiplies your software bill with no volume discounts.
- Customer support is locked behind an online ticket queue with no direct telephone line when invoice syncs fail with Xero.
- The web enquiry widget drops homeowner messages into a desktop inbox that sits unread while you are working on the tools.
- The system organizes job sheets after work is won, but leaves your front door unguarded when emergency calls land on site.
- Susan AI picks up customer calls and WhatsApp messages in four seconds for $50 a month after a 7-day free trial, securing card deposits before competitors answer.
How Tradify pricing actually works in 2026: Plans, per-user seat fees, and add-on costs
If you ask electricians and heating engineers at the trade counter in City Electrical Factors or Edmundsons about Tradify, most will tell you it is far simpler than corporate platforms like Simpro. You do not have to sit through three months of sales calls or hand over three thousand pounds upfront for implementation consultants. You can go to their website with a company debit card, enter your details, and start building jobs before your second cup of tea.
Tradify gives you two billing options. If you pay month-to-month, you pay thirty-nine pounds plus VAT per user per month. In the UK, twenty percent VAT pushes that charge to £46.80 for every single login. If you pay twelve months upfront on an annual commitment, the price drops to twenty-nine pounds plus VAT per user per month (£34.80 after tax). In Australia and New Zealand, pricing sits around thirty-nine to forty-nine dollars per user, while US contractors pay thirty-nine to forty-nine dollars per head.
The problem for growing trade firms is the per-user seat multiplier. Unlike ServiceM8 which charges for completed jobs, or Susan AI which charges one flat $50 monthly fee after a 7-day free trial for your whole team, Tradify charges for every human who touches a screen. If you run two vans with an office helper, an apprentice, and bring on a self-employed plumber or sparky for a three-week commercial refurbishment, your team reaches five users. Five users on monthly billing costs one hundred and ninety-five pounds plus VAT every month, pulling £234 out of your business account. If you take on two summer apprentices, you pay an extra £93.60 every thirty days just so two teenagers can read job descriptions on an iPhone.
You also have to budget for add-ons. While standard job cards, quoting, and basic timesheets are included, text message alerts require prepaid SMS bundles costing five to ten pence per message. If you collect customer card payments through Tradify Payments powered by Stripe, you pay standard merchant processing charges of 1.4% to 2.9% plus twenty pence per transaction. If you want supplier invoice integrations with City Electrical Factors, Edmundsons, Rexel, or Wolseley, you have to maintain trade accounts and import digital bills.
Follow Mark's real cash outlay across twelve months in Bristol. For his core team of three on monthly billing, Mark spent £1,404 plus VAT across the year just on base seats. When a three-month shop fit-out in Clifton required a subcontract electrician, adding that temporary user added another £156 plus VAT. Buying automated SMS reminder packs to keep domestic customers informed cost another one hundred and eighty pounds over the year. In total, Mark spent £1,740 plus VAT, which meant £2,088 leaving his Lloyds bank account. Tradify is reasonably priced compared to enterprise tools, but paying full rate for an apprentice who only checks postcodes still grates on trade owners.
What trade contractors complain about in Tradify reviews
Mark hears the same stories from other electrical and plumbing subcontractors leaning against the trade counter in Days Road on wet Friday mornings.
The apprentice seat tax causes the loudest grumbles. On a building site, an apprentice is there to pull 2.5mm twin-and-earth cable, carry steps, and learn how to bend galvanised conduit. They do not quote three-phase distribution boards or send customer statements. Mark's lad Harvey needs an app for sixty seconds at eight in the morning to see which street in Bristol the van is heading to, and sixty seconds at half past four to tap clock-out. Paying forty quid a month for a teenager to check a postcode feels like an open penalty on taking on young trainees. Plenty of sparks try sharing one login on two phones to save cash, but then timesheets get tangled and you cannot tell who was on site.
The silent customer support line causes just as much frustration. Tradify runs out of New Zealand with UK staff, but everything goes through web tickets. There is not an 0800 telephone number you can ring when things go sideways. When an invoice fails to push across into Xero on a Friday afternoon right when you need to run CIS returns for subcontractors, you cannot talk to a human. You submit a ticket and wait for an email. Sitting in a van in a supermarket car park waiting four hours for an email reply while your subcontractors want paying is not how trade owners want to spend their Friday.
Then you have the dead-end web enquiry form. Tradify gives you a contact box widget to embed on your website. Homeowners fill it in, and it drops an enquiry into your Tradify dashboard. But when a homeowner has water pouring through a kitchen ceiling from an upstairs bathroom, they are not going to sit at a laptop waiting for an email reply at eight o'clock at night. They want someone answering on WhatsApp within thirty seconds with a price and an arrival window. A web form sitting in an office inbox while you are on site loses jobs to faster competitors every single week.
Offline syncing out in Somerset and the Cotswolds causes headaches too. When Tom was rewiring an old stone farmhouse out near Chew Magna with two-foot-thick rubble walls and zero mobile bars, Tradify Mobile refused to save his job notes. Once he drove back into 4G range by the ring road, his phone threw a database sync conflict that wiped out his afternoon parts list.
Is Tradify worth it? Weighing simple job management against front-door leaks
For a solo sparky or a two-man firm who just wants clean quotes, job sheets, and Xero invoice sync, Tradify beats running a business out of a cardboard shoebox. You can set it up in an evening, it looks tidy to clients, and it stops delivery notes getting lost under van seats.
Tradify gets your quotes emailed faster and stops you forgetting parts from Edmundsons. But tracking work once you have it in the diary is only half the battle. If your mobile rings twenty times a week and you only answer eight because your boots are on site, you are leaking hundreds of pounds in profit every week.
The speed-to-lead reality on Google Maps is brutal. Most homeowners whose calls hit voicemail hang up in seconds and dial the next electrician down the road. If you do not answer or text back within two minutes, that customer is gone. A trade firm spending forty quid a month on job tracking while losing three hundred pounds a week in missed callouts is like putting a brand-new padlock on an empty shipping container.
Tying Tradify to an autonomous front desk solves that problem. Tradify keeps your job sheets and timesheets tidy in the background, while Susan AI guards your front door twenty-four hours a day.
Real-world intake flow: Booking an emergency electrical repair in 90 seconds
Look at how an emergency job gets secured without the electrician touching a screen while on site.
A homeowner named Sarah in Redland, Bristol notices her lights and downstairs sockets have gone dead. She finds Mark's business on Google Maps and sends a message to his business number.
Sarah sends a WhatsApp message at quarter past two in the afternoon: "Hi, our main power just cut out in our house in Redland. The fuse switch tripped and won't stay up when I push it. We've got a fridge full of food and no lights. Are you able to send an electrician today?"
Within four seconds, Susan AI replies on WhatsApp: "Hello Sarah, thanks for getting in touch with Mark's Electrical Solutions! We can definitely help get your power back on. To triage this safely for our electrician, could you send a quick photo of your consumer unit (fuse board) showing the switch that tripped?"
Sarah snaps a clear photo of her modern Hager split-load board and sends it over at 14:16.
Susan AI analyzes the image and replies within six seconds: "Thanks for the photo! That shows the downstairs socket RCD has tripped, which usually indicates an appliance fault or water ingress on a socket circuit. Mark can carry out an emergency diagnostic callout today between 16:30 and 17:30. Our emergency diagnostic rate for Redland (BS6) is £140 + VAT for the first hour on site, which includes fault-finding with our insulation resistance testers. Would that 16:30 arrival window suit you?"
Sarah replies immediately: "Yes please, 16:30 would be brilliant! How do we lock that in?"
Susan AI sends a secure deposit link: "Perfect. To secure Mark's arrival slot and dispatch the van, please tap the link below to leave a £40 booking deposit via Apple Pay or debit card (deducted from your final invoice): [pay.hiresusan.co.uk/dep-83921]. As soon as that clears, Mark's van is locked into the diary!"
Sarah taps the link, confirms with Face ID on Apple Pay, and the deposit clears into Stripe within twenty seconds.
Susan AI sends the booking confirmation: "Payment received, thank you! Mark is scheduled for 16:30 at your Redland address today. He'll have his test gear ready. See you shortly!"
Behind the scenes, Susan AI creates a new Job Card in Tradify, attaches Sarah's photo of the Hager board, logs the forty-pound deposit against the job, and slots the appointment into Mark's diary. Mark does not touch his phone until he climbs down his ladder in Clifton at half past three.
Connecting Susan AI to your trade operations in three simple steps
Setting up an autonomous front desk alongside Tradify takes less than thirty minutes.
Diverting your unanswered calls takes two minutes. You do not need to change your business number or buy new SIM cards. You dial a standard call forwarding sequence on your mobile like star-star-six-one-star. Whenever you have both hands inside a consumer unit or you are driving along the M32, unanswered rings transfer smoothly to Susan after fifteen seconds.
Typing in your standard rates and callout rules is just as simple. Mark entered his Bristol callout fee of £140 plus VAT for the first hour, his weekend emergency rates, his typical travel postcodes across BS1 to BS16, and what he charges for routine jobs like replacement shower pulls or condition reports.
Plugging in your accounts completes the connection. Susan connects directly to Tradify, Google Calendar, and Xero. When a new enquiry comes in, Susan replies on WhatsApp within four seconds, gets pictures of the fuse board or shower unit, quotes Mark's callout rate, collects an Apple Pay deposit, and drops a new job card straight into Tradify before Mark even finishes his brew.
Comparing the trade admin stack: Tradify vs Generic FSM Software vs Susan AI
Look at how the daily numbers stack up across different trade setups.
Running everything on paper pads and WhatsApp chats with your lads costs nothing in software. But you pay for it in sweat. You spend your Sunday mornings at the kitchen table sorting crumpled receipts from CEF and Screwfix, trying to decipher what fittings Harvey used on Thursday. And when a busy landlord rings with an emergency repair while your drill is spinning, the call drops to voicemail and you forfeit a three-hundred-pound job without even knowing your phone rang.
Tradify gets your quotes and timesheets organized on an iPad. It costs thirty-nine quid a month for each user and links into Xero. But like every internal field tool, it does nothing when your phone rings on site. If you have three people on the books, you hand over one hundred and seventeen pounds plus VAT every month, yet missed calls keep leaking to other firms on Google Maps.
Enterprise systems like Simpro take things to the other extreme. You swallow four grand in consulting fees upfront and pay nearly a grand a month for user seats. You get deep job costing for commercial sites once a contract is signed, but your front desk remains completely empty after five o'clock. When an emergency call comes in, the phone still rings out to an empty answering machine.
Susan AI bridges that gap for forty-nine pounds a month flat. She picks up your calls in four seconds, collects photos on WhatsApp, quotes your diagnostic callout fee, and banks an Apple Pay deposit while you stay on the tools. Have a look at our guide on phone answering service for tradesmen and our step-by-step walkthrough of Tradify WhatsApp integration to see how simple the setup is.
Advanced capabilities: From certification attachments to automated supplier invoicing
Domestic and commercial electrical jobs demand more than just booking an appointment. When Mark deals with landlords and shop owners across Bristol, jobs require specific details before an engineer can turn a screwdriver.
Susan AI collects access gate codes, key safe combinations, and parking restrictions before dispatching your van. When a commercial unit on an industrial estate has a security barrier or specific site induction rules, Susan logs those instructions straight into the job card.
She also handles out-of-hours rate switching automatically. When an inquiry comes in at ten o'clock on a Saturday night, she quotes your emergency weekend rate and takes a non-refundable card deposit before waking your on-call spark.
And when work wraps up, Susan sends instant payment links over WhatsApp so you get paid before leaving the driveway. When commercial clients or landlords take thirty days to pay, chasing invoices becomes another unpaid evening job. We put together practical scripts in our guide on how to ask for payment politely and our walkthrough on how to chase an invoice without being rude. If you want to tidy up your written quotes, grab our contractor estimate template to speed up approvals.
The 5 best Tradify alternatives for trade businesses in 2026
If you want to keep software overheads sensible without sacrificing your evenings, consider these options.
Hook Susan AI into your existing office number and WhatsApp for forty-nine quid a month. When you are up a ladder or driving between jobs, Susan picks up within four seconds, gets pictures of the fault, quotes your diagnostic fee, and takes an Apple Pay deposit so the customer stops ringing around. You can link Susan straight to Xero or QuickBooks to handle your invoicing, saving hundreds every year in user licenses.
If your lads carry iPhones and your main bread and butter is domestic boiler breakdowns or emergency electrical repairs, ServiceM8 works well. You pay for completed jobs rather than user seats, so you can bring on an apprentice or a subcontract spark without your monthly direct debit jumping through the roof. Just remember that anyone carrying an Android phone is left out in the cold. Check our review of ServiceM8 pricing and reviews for real figures.
Jobber works well if you run domestic service work and light commercial maintenance. You can put down a company card, set up your dispatch board over a weekend, and start quoting on Monday morning without dealing with sales reps. It lacks complex commercial tender tools, but setup is straightforward. Check our guide on Jobber pricing and alternatives to see plan details.
Fergus is designed specifically for tradespeople and focuses heavily on gross profit margins and job costing. It helps you see exactly where money is made or lost on materials and labour. Pricing is per user, but it gives you tighter financial visibility on commercial contracts than Tradify.
And for commercial mechanical, electrical, and HVAC contractors with ten or more vans running multi-stage commercial contracts, Simpro provides deep purchase order and asset management. Just remember you face four grand in setup fees and a twelve-month direct debit contract. Check our breakdown of Simpro pricing and reviews for details.
If no-shows cost your business money, our guide on how to reduce appointment no-shows shares practical ways to keep your vans busy.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
Every single set of boots on site adds to your bill. If you run three vans and take on an apprentice, Tradify charges you for four separate user accounts every month. There are no free read-only seats for junior lads, so an apprentice who only looks at an address at eight in the morning costs thirty-nine pounds plus VAT every month.
Can you get cheaper logins for apprentices or trainees?
Tradify will not discount them. When you add a new user to your account, you pay the exact same thirty-nine quid whether they are an approved electrician pricing high-voltage switchgear or a sixteen-year-old apprentice learning how to strip twin-and-earth cable. Plenty of contractors try sharing one login between two lads on site, but that scrambles your timesheets and makes a mess of your job records.
What happens when a customer calls while your boots are on site?
They ring the next sparky on Google Maps. If a landlord has a tripped RCD cutting power to a tenant's fridge during freshers week, they are not going to leave a polite message on an answering machine and wait around. Susan AI answers on WhatsApp within four seconds while your hands are inside a consumer unit, asks for photos of the fault, quotes your callout rate, and takes an Apple Pay deposit so the job is yours.
Do you have to ditch Tradify to use Susan AI?
Not at all. You keep Tradify for running your job sheets, timesheets, and Xero invoicing in the van. Susan simply covers your front door. When a customer calls your mobile while you are pulling cable or sends a message on WhatsApp, Susan picks up in four seconds, gets pictures of the fault, quotes your callout rate, and takes an Apple Pay deposit. Once the job is booked, she drops the new job card straight into Tradify so your lads can see the details.
If you are tired of losing jobs while working on site, take a look at our transparent pricing plans, check out our Tradify WhatsApp integration guide, or see how other electricians and trades run their front desk.