Is ServiceM8 free?

Short answer. Yes. ServiceM8 has a real free plan, and it is not a trial that runs out. One user, thirty job credits a month, nothing to pay, and you earn extra credits every time a customer pays you by card. A sole trader can run a proper business on it. What ends it is never the price, it is one of two gates, and the way you walk through them can quietly cost you £1,000.

Where I stand, because you should know before you take advice from me. I set ServiceM8 up for a living and I am certified and listed by them. I do not sell licences, so your subscription costs the same whoever you talk to, but ServiceM8 does pay its partners a share on clients they bring in. So I am not a neutral party here, and most of this page is me telling you not to pay anybody yet.

What the free plan actually gives you

The headline limits, straight off ServiceM8's own free plan page.

On the texts, be careful what you budget. The pricing table says 5p a text on every plan. The free plan page, on the UK site, says 10c. Cents. Nobody has corrected it, so assume the higher one and check your first bill.

Now the part that surprises people. I went through the tick icons on ServiceM8's plan comparison table one row at a time rather than reading the marketing above it, and the free plan carries a tick on nearly everything.

Scheduling, quoting, invoicing, job and client history, photos on the job card, online bookings, card payments including Tap to Pay, offline access, the Mac and PC app, job templates, document scanning, recurring jobs. The automations too: booking confirmations, reminders, quote follow-ups and payment chasing all run on their own once somebody sets them up. And the accounting sync, which works on every plan including this one, and which I have written up in what actually syncs between ServiceM8 and Xero.

There is a comic touch in that table. The free plan also ticks live staff GPS, urgent dispatch, staff messaging and timesheets. On a plan that allows exactly one user. You are welcome to message yourself.

The free plan and the free trial are two different things

Most of the confusion on this question comes from here, and ServiceM8's own documentation is part of the reason.

The trial is 14 days, needs no card, and their billing article says it includes unlimited jobs and access to all add-ons. So for a fortnight you can build forms, track assets and send proposals. It is a better product than the free plan. The free plan is what you can sit on forever afterwards: thirty credits, one user, the essentials.

Here is the odd bit. That same billing article tells you to choose a capped plan from Starter, Growing, Premium or Premium Plus, and says that after the trial you will need to choose one to carry on using ServiceM8. It never mentions the free plan. Their marketing sells it hard and their billing documentation reads as though it does not exist, which is probably where the people who told you there is no free tier got it from.

So use the trial properly. A fortnight with everything switched on is the only time you will see the whole product, and it is the right window to test your real jobs on your real phone before you decide what you need.

Thirty jobs is not thirty jobs

Credits cut both ways, and almost nobody explains it before somebody runs out.

In your favour: you are charged one credit per job number. ServiceM8's help centre puts it plainly, that you can schedule, invoice or quote a job as many times as you like for the one fee, and that a job could stay open for ten years and still count once. A kitchen refit you visit nine times is one credit.

Against you: a quote that never turns into work has still spent its credit. An accepted quote becoming a work order does not cost a second one, but the three you lost are gone. I worked that through on a normal month in is ServiceM8 a CRM. The short version is that quoting businesses burn credits about twice as fast as they expect.

The bonus jobs are the clever bit

Every card payment you take through ServiceM8 and Stripe earns you an extra credit on the free plan. Their own example: take card payment on 15 invoices and you have 45 credits that month instead of 30, with no cap on how many you can earn. It counts whether the customer taps a card on your phone, scans your QR code, pays the link in their invoice, or you key it in.

Two things to be straight about. Bonus credits reset with your billing cycle, so unused ones do not carry over, and you cannot bank a quiet January to survive a busy June. And card payments are not free. ServiceM8 Pay's UK rates run 1.70% plus 20p on a standard domestic card, up to 3.45% plus 20p on international and American Express, so a £400 invoice costs you about £7 at the standard rate. You are buying job credits with card fees. Fair trade if you were taking cards anyway, daft if you were not.

When you hit the ceiling

Go over and you carry on as normal for another seven days. If your billing month resets inside that window the credits reset and nothing happens. If it does not, you are prompted to upgrade. You cannot buy a few extra jobs either: only Premium Plus publishes a per job price, 15p.

One trick worth knowing, and it costs nothing. Reminders are not jobs. ServiceM8 says you are only charged for reminders that get converted into jobs, and that you can delete one if the customer does not go ahead. So for annual services, set a reminder rather than letting a recurring job create itself, and you only spend a credit when the work is real. That makes thirty credits stretch a long way on a maintenance round, and it is the sort of thing I set up on day one rather than something you find out in month four.

What is switched off

The honest list, because the gates decide whether the free plan works for you, not the job count.

• Building your own forms and certificates. Growing, £59 a month. For an electrician or a gas engineer that is usually the whole decision, and I have written it up for electricians specifically.
• Asset management. Growing. Service the same boilers or alarms year after year and want a history per unit, that is where it lives.
• Proposals, bundles and the ServiceM8 Inbox. Growing. Job costing, markup billing and Knowledge. Premium, £119. Progress invoicing and supplier invoice importing. Starter, £25.
• Zapier, n8n, the API and third party add-ons. All Starter and up, so anything in the add-on store built by another developer is off limits on free.
• Office Agent. ServiceM8's new assistant, which drafts quotes, emails and texts for you to approve, is on the four paid plans only. The Pro version is a further £29 a month here.
• More than one login. The moment you take somebody on, free is over. Every paid plan then has unlimited users, which is the best thing about ServiceM8's pricing and the reason the sums in the Tradify comparison land where they do.

You can buy a certificate, you just cannot build one

This distinction is worth real money and I have not seen it written down anywhere else.

Using a form works on any plan. ServiceM8's own FAQ says customers on all plans, and it names the free plan in brackets, can buy and use any form from the Form Store. Building or editing one is what sits behind Growing.

So a gas engineer on the free plan can buy a CP12 and issue it from a phone. I counted the store on the day of writing: 207 forms, one of them free, the cheapest paid one 99 cents and the dearest $399. Cents and dollars, on the UK page, with no pound prices anywhere in it. Their pricing FAQ still claims over 250 forms, which is not what is there.

Before anybody spends: I have not opened these forms, and nor has whoever tells you they are compliant. A name matching your certificate does not prove the contents do. Look at the preview before you pay, and if the wording has to be yours, you are on Growing and building it.

Who the free plan genuinely suits

Flatly, and at my own expense: if you are one person doing twenty or thirty jobs a month, taking cards, and your paperwork is invoices rather than certificates, the free plan is enough. Start there. Do not pay me, do not pay them, and come back when something actually hurts.

It stops working the day one of these is true:

• Somebody else needs a login.
• You need a certificate in your own wording.
• You are tracking equipment you service repeatedly.
• You are quoting enough that lost quotes eat the thirty.

Those are plan decisions, and the full ladder with the real numbers is in what ServiceM8 really costs in the UK.

The upgrade button that can cost you £1,000

If you read nothing else here, read this. It is the one mistake you cannot undo afterwards.

When the free plan runs out of road, the prompt you are most likely to be holding is the one in the app on your phone. ServiceM8's free plan page says it plainly: payment is accepted by credit or debit card online, or by in app purchase with your Apple ID.

Subscribe that second way and three things happen, all of them from ServiceM8's own documentation.

• You lose the £1,000 rebate. The terms say you must subscribe through the online dashboard login, and that the offer is not compatible with third party app stores, subscribing through Xero, or Apple in app purchase subscriptions. No appeal is written anywhere.
• You are capped at Growing. Their help centre says that if you set the plan up through Apple subscriptions you have to cancel it and move billing to the dashboard before you can go beyond Growing or use certain add-ons. The in app plan picker, oddly, still offers a Lite plan that appears nowhere on the UK pricing page.
• Office Agent Pro is off until you switch to direct billing.

The fix takes two minutes and only works before you commit: subscribe at servicem8.com on a computer, not in the app. That is the whole difference between claiming £800 back and not.

Why "set it up now and upgrade later" breaks the rebate

The rebate pays back 100% of what you spend with a certified and listed partner, capped at £1,000, as credit against your bill at half your plan price each month. Pay me £800 and you get £800 back. The full rules are here.

But it is tied to a subscription, and the free plan is not one. The terms say only new subscribers are eligible, and that the claim must go in within 60 days of both subscribing and the earliest partner invoice date.

Read that twice, because the trap is in the word both. Pay somebody in March, sit happily on the free plan, subscribe in October, and the claim is dead on the invoice date even though you subscribed yesterday. The work and the subscription have to land in the same couple of months, the services have to be finished and paid in full by the day you claim, and you pay your first month at full price while it is assessed.

One more edge, worth knowing if you have been playing the long game. Working through ServiceM8's Learning Roadmap earns rewards, including higher job and SMS limits and plan upgrades, which is a good deal on a free plan. The rebate terms say an approved claim replaces active discounts and that you will not then be able to take advantage of any other ServiceM8 offer such as free plan upgrades. Neither page says what happens if you took a roadmap reward first. So get ServiceM8's answer in writing before you spend anything with a partner. Same as their iPhone fund, which does not stack either.

Four things that can cost you the account

None of these are reasons to avoid the free plan. They are reasons to know what you are sitting on.

Log in at least twice a year

ServiceM8 says that if you have not logged into your account in over 120 days it becomes inactive and may be removed from their servers, with a reminder before that happens. Academic for a paying customer. Not academic for somebody who parked a quiet sole trader account on the free plan over winter.

Cancelling deletes everything, and there is no read only mode

Their own answer is blunt: cancelling the subscription permanently deletes the account and all its data, and there is no option to keep read only access without an active subscription. Which makes the free plan more useful than it first looks. It is the only way to keep years of job history alive without paying, because the alternative is not a dormant archive, it is deletion.

You can back up, but you cannot restore

There is a self service backup under Settings, once every 24 hours. ServiceM8 says it is for reference only and the data cannot be imported into a new or separate ServiceM8 account. Evidence, not an escape route.

Dropping back down turns things off

You can upgrade or downgrade whenever you like with no lock in, and credit from the old plan is applied pro rata. But add ons not included in the plan you drop to deactivate automatically. Go from Growing back to free and the forms you built go quiet.

So, is ServiceM8 free

Yes, properly free, for one person doing a modest number of jobs. No card, no countdown, and an allowance you top up by getting paid faster, which is a reward pointed in the right direction for once.

It is also the best unpaid sales pitch in this category, and we may as well both be honest that this is the point of it. You run your business on their software for a year, your customers and your price list and your history all end up in there, and the day you hire an apprentice the decision has already made itself.

Fine, as long as you leave on your own terms. Use the fourteen days to see the whole product. Sit on free for as long as it genuinely works. When it stops, subscribe on a computer rather than in the app, and get the setup and the subscription inside the same couple of months so the £1,000 is still there to claim. That last bit is my job, and the rebate is designed to pay for it.