Field Service Pricing Strategy:

You have a lot of things to consider when determining your field service pricing and whether you should raise your prices.

• Are you trying to capture more market share?
• What are your fixed and variable costs by job and overall?
• Is your job a one-time job or is it recurring?
• What warranties and future liabilities do you have for that job?
• Is there an upsell opportunity if you land the job?

The list goes on, but at the end of the day, the buyer and the seller must agree on a price for a clearly-defined scope of work. And the more confident you are with your pricing calculations, the more convincing you’ll be as the seller.

I recently had a house cleaner quote me a rate $30 higher than the competition. She told me that she understood I wanted to save money, but she guaranteed her work and my satisfaction. She didn’t budge at all, and she made a compelling case. She knew her costs and her worth.

When it comes to setting prices, you are your own worst critic, and you know all of your shortcomings.

Your customers and other outsiders have perspective and can give you valuable feedback on pricing. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had customers and vendors tell me that we don’t charge enough for Kickserv. Truth be told, when we started, we came in too low. We were not confident with what the market would bear, and had not yet built a fully-featured product. We also wanted to capture a ton of market share, as field service software was still a novel concept. Pencil and paper was our biggest competition back in 2006!

Now, 15 years later, we are finally getting around to raising our prices (slightly!) and shifting more complex features to our higher-level Business and Premium plans. We made some small adjustments back in 2017, but those were mostly for new customers–our oldest and most loyal customers never saw a price increase. This time around, we made the difficult decision to move everyone to our new pricing plans. Our costs have gone up over the years (even more so in the past year), and we are pouring more resources into building a better product for our customers.

Some of the changes we made:

• Our base plan (Lite) increased from $39 to $59 but added 3 more users (from 2 to 5).
• The Standard plan increased from $99 to $119 and added 5 users, plus access to additional features from higher plans.
• The Business plan is now limited to 20 users.

We made no changes to the Premium plan, since it was already our highest tier. You can read all of the details about our pricing change in this post.

The moral of the story: take a hard look at your pricing strategy and your costs. Get confident with what you need to charge in order to make a buck while expanding your business.

Remember that 95% of businesses don’t make it in the first year, and nearly 50% are gone in the first 5 years. They ran out of cash and were probably not charging enough for their services.

Think about it this way: if you can’t stay in business, how can you serve your customers?