How Does Team and Sub-User Pricing Work for UK Trade Job Management Software in 2026?

What does a “sub-user” actually mean?

A sub-user is a separate login for someone else on the team, tied to the same business account rather than a fresh, standalone subscription. The account holder, the “master user”, controls what each sub-user can see and do, and every sub-user’s jobs, quotes, invoices and certificates land in the one shared account rather than a personal silo.

That matters for a trade business because a job usually passes through more than one pair of hands: an engineer books it, completes it, and someone else, an office admin, a partner, a second engineer, ends up invoicing it or scheduling the next visit. A sub-user lets that second person work inside the same job record instead of texting updates across.

We bolt sub-users onto a PRO+ account, at £10.99 a month or £109.99 a year each, and they are only available on PRO+, not on LITE or PRO. LITE and PRO are single-login plans; PRO+ is the plan we built for more than one person.

Why do job management apps charge per seat?

In the named comparison set below, Tradify and Powered Now charge by the seat from the first paid login, while ServiceM8 uses flat tiers above its free plan. That is why team size changes the comparison.

The trade-off for the buyer is that a per-seat model can cost more when a business adds a second pair of hands. Tradify prices every one of its UK tiers per user from the first seat, £34, £37 or £44 a month depending on the plan ^[1].

Powered Now also prices its paid tiers per user, before VAT: Business is £28 a month, Professional £32, and Premium £40, each multiplied by however many people are logged in ^[3].

We price it differently. LITE and PRO are flat, single-login prices with no seat count at all. PRO+ then adds a flat account price plus a much cheaper per-seat add-on for every extra login beyond the first, rather than pricing every login at the plan’s full rate.

How does Checker’s PRO+ sub-user pricing actually work in 2026?

Our PRO+ plan costs £25.99 a month or £259.99 a year, plus VAT, and that price covers everything PRO does (the customer database, job scheduling, service reminders, business analytics, and two-way sync with Xero, plus QuickBooks and Sage integrations) on the master user’s own login. Extra logins are the add-on: £10.99 a month or £109.99 a year each, and there is no cap on how many a business can add.

That structure has two practical effects for a growing team. First, the second login costs less than the first: adding one sub-user to a PRO+ account (£25.99 plus £10.99) works out at £36.98 a month total for two people, cheaper than a single Tradify Pro seat plus a second one at £74 ^[1]. Second, every extra person after that costs the same flat £10.99, unlike the step change a business can face when it crosses a plan tier.

What PRO+ does not do is turn sub-users into separate accounts. Every sub-user works inside the one Checker account: one set of customer records, one job list, one invoicing history. The master user decides who can see which jobs and how much of the account each person can touch, but the underlying data stays in one place rather than being split across logins.

What should a growing trade team weigh before adding a second login?

Cost per seat is the easy number to compare. The harder questions are the ones that actually decide whether a second login helps or gets in the way.

Who needs to see what. An apprentice shadowing on jobs needs the diary and the job sheet, not necessarily the full customer history or the business’s financial reports. An office admin doing the invoicing needs the opposite: full visibility into completed jobs and payment status, but no reason to be on the tools list for a boiler service. Our master-user control is built around exactly this: deciding per sub-user what they can see and change, rather than giving everyone the same access by default.

Whether the second person is an employee or a subcontractor. If a trade business brings in a subcontractor for overflow work before taking on a direct employee, the access needed may be different. Under the Construction Industry Scheme, a contractor deducts money from a subcontractor’s payments and passes it to HMRC ^[8], a different relationship to payroll entirely. A subcontractor working a single job might only need temporary access to that one record, while a permanent hire needs a standing login.

What taking on an employee actually triggers. If a business pays someone as an employee rather than a subcontractor, it must register as an employer with HMRC before the first payday ^[7] and hold Employers’ Liability insurance covering at least £5 million ^[9]. A cheap extra login does not remove either requirement.

Who actually owns the account. Because every sub-user shares that same Checker account, the master user keeps control of the customer list, the job history and the certificates even if a sub-user later leaves the business. That is worth confirming on any tool before adding a second person: whether the data a new hire creates belongs to the account or effectively leaves with them.

None of this is unique to software buying. At the start of 2025, 4.3 million of the UK’s 5.7 million private-sector businesses, 75%, had no employees beyond the owner ^[6]. Those questions become relevant when a particular business decides it needs a second login.

One engineer, a small team, a growing business: what each actually costs

The table below prices a solo setup, a small team of three and a growing team of six across four tools. ServiceM8’s tiers cap job volume, so a busier business may need a higher tier than the one shown.

Prices are ex-VAT monthly figures. ServiceM8’s flat tiers hold their price regardless of headcount, because the plan scales by job volume rather than seat count, so a team of three and a team of six can sit on the same Growing or Premium tier as long as job volume allows.

Do all competitors charge per seat from day one?

Not all of them, and not in the same way. Tradify and Powered Now price every paid seat individually from the entry tier up, which is straightforward to understand but means the bill rises in a straight line with every hire ^[1][3].

ServiceM8 does the opposite above its free tier: Starter, Growing, Premium and Premium Plus all list “Unlimited Users” ^[2]. Its price instead scales with job volume and SMS usage, so a business can add people without adding seats while job volume stays inside the tier’s cap.

BigChange lists no prices at all on its pricing page, just a “Request pricing” call to action that routes to a demo ^[4], so any per-user structure it has is only visible after a sales conversation.

Commusoft’s pricing route leads to a Schedule Call form rather than a list of numbers ^[5].

That range matters for a growing team because the right pricing shape depends on what else the plan bundles. Powered Now’s staff-tracking feature appears from its Professional tier upward, so a business planning to track staff location and time may find that bundled into the per-seat price ^[3].

A team that needs job costing or subcontractor scheduling may value features Tradify bundles into its Pro and Plus tiers, even where a cheaper flat add-on exists elsewhere. Tradify’s AI tools sit a tier higher still: its pricing page states that AI features are available on its Plus plan only ^[1].

The lowest headline number is not automatically the right fit if the plan does not include the functions a business needs.

Frequently asked questions

Making the call

A sub-user is a software decision, but the moment it becomes worth paying for usually lines up with a bigger one: whether the business is ready to have someone else working under its name, on its jobs, inside its records. Once that decision is made, work through the software side in order: plan tier, seat cost, who sees what, and let the answer to those three questions decide when the second login goes on the account.