Cleaning Business Software: 5 Tools Priced for Real Crews

Cleaning business software has to do three things well: put the same clients back on the schedule every week, get the right person to the right door, and collect payment without chasing. The price that matters is not the plan on the pricing page. It is the monthly cost for your crew, because cleaning crews are large and the revenue per person is low. This guide covers five tools, with every price read from the vendor’s own pricing page on 9 and 10 November 2026.

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Cleaning Business Software at a Glance

Here is the entry price of each tool, with what it counts. Prices are per month. Compare the unit as much as the number: Jobber and Housecall Pro charge by plan and user count, ServiceM8 by jobs a month, GorillaDesk by route, and Joist by documents sent.

ServiceM8 also has a Free plan at $0/mo for one user and 30 jobs a month. Joist’s monthly price for Basics is $10/mo. Full plan tables for each vendor are in the picks below.

How to Read the Table

A low entry price says little until you know your crew size. A solo cleaner and a crew of eight both look at the same pricing page, and only one of them is paying for logins that go mostly unused. The cost-per-cleaner section further down runs the numbers for 1, 3 and 8 people.

Who Should Skip This Whole Category

If you clean fewer than ten homes a week and bill by text message, software can wait. A paper diary, a shared calendar and an invoice template do the job, and you keep the subscription money. Our cleaning invoice template covers the invoicing half for free.

Residential vs Commercial Cleaning: Different Needs

Both kinds of cleaning are field service work, so the same tools can handle both. What changes is which job you do ten times a week, and that is the job to test in any free trial.

Recurring Visits and Route Density

Residential cleaning runs on repeat. The same home every week, every two weeks or every month, often at the same time. The software should let you set that pattern once and then stop thinking about it. When a client skips a week or moves a visit, you want to change one date without breaking the pattern.

Route density is the other half. A crew that cleans five homes in one neighborhood earns more per day than a crew that crosses the city between jobs. Software helps when it shows the day as a map or a list of stops in order, and it hurts when it makes you rebuild the day by hand each morning. Ask of any tool: can I see tomorrow’s stops for each cleaner in order, and move one without touching the rest?

Pricing by route, as GorillaDesk does at $49/mo per route, matches how a residential business grows: you add a route when you add a crew vehicle, and the people riding in it do not change the bill.

Commercial Contracts and Checklists

Commercial cleaning is a different rhythm. Fewer clients, larger contracts, fixed scopes of work, and a client who wants proof that the checklist was done. You invoice an account, not a homeowner, often monthly and often on terms rather than by card at the door.

So for commercial work, test three things. Can you write a recurring job with a fixed monthly amount? Can each visit carry a checklist your cleaners tick off? Can you send one invoice for several sites? Any tool that fails your own version of those three tests is the wrong tool, whatever its feature page says. We have not tested features for this page, so open each vendor’s feature list and compare it with your contracts.

If You Do Both

Many cleaning businesses run residential recurring work and a few commercial accounts side by side. In that case price the crew, not the job type. The headcount drives the bill on the per-user tools, while the job count and route count drive it on the others.

The Picks

We rank on price shape for a cleaning crew, not on commissions. No affiliate deal changes the order of this page.

Jobber

Jobber starts at $29/mo for one user on Core billed yearly. Team plans start at $99/mo for Connect, with tiers of 1, 5, 10 and 15 users. Extra users cost $29/mo each.

• Good for: owner-led crews of 3 to 15 who want one price covering the whole team.
• Watch for: every cleaner with a login counts as a user. For a crew of 8 billed yearly the lowest route is $229/mo for the 10-user tier.
• Trial: 14 days on the Grow plan, no credit card required.

Our full breakdown is in Jobber pricing.

Housecall Pro

Housecall Pro costs $59/mo billed yearly for one user on Basic, $149/mo for five users on Essentials, and $299/mo for eight users on Max. Extra users cost $35/mo each, and the pricing page lists that only on Max.

• Good for: crews of up to 5 or up to 8 who fit a tier exactly.
• Watch for: the cost climbs past 8 people because each extra user is a flat fee on top of the highest plan. Billed month to month, the same plans are $79/mo, $189/mo and $329/mo.
• Trial: 14 days with full access to Max, no credit card required.

ServiceM8

ServiceM8 prices by the number of jobs a month, with unlimited users on paid plans: Starter at $29/mo for 50 jobs, Growing at $79/mo for 150, Premium at $149/mo for 500, and Premium Plus at $349/mo for 1,500 or more. The Free plan covers one user and 30 jobs.

• Good for: crews with many cleaners and a modest number of jobs, because adding a cleaner does not change the bill.
• Watch for: every visit to a recurring client may count as a job. Weekly clients mean four or more jobs per client a month, so check how ServiceM8 counts a repeating job before you pick a plan. If it counts each visit, a busy residential business moves up the plan ladder quickly.
• Trial: 14 days, no credit card required.

GorillaDesk

GorillaDesk charges per route with unlimited admin, manager, sales and crew users: Basic at $49/mo per route, Pro at $99/mo per route, and Growth at $149/mo per route.

• Good for: residential crews on fixed routes, where one vehicle and one team means one route.
• Watch for: a business with six vehicles pays for six routes, so the price scales with vehicles, not people. Check how GorillaDesk defines a route for your setup before you commit.
• Trial: 14 days, no credit card required.

Joist

Joist is the lightest of the five: $8.34/mo billed yearly for Basics, capped at five documents a month, $14.17/mo for Pro and $26.67/mo for Elite, both with unlimited documents.

• Good for: a solo cleaner who mainly needs estimates and invoices that look professional.
• Watch for: the documents cap. Five documents a month does not cover a client list that bills weekly. Joist also lists a higher plan, Run, with a 14 day trial. Read its page for what it adds beyond documents.

Cost per Cleaner

This is where cleaning differs from plumbing or HVAC. A plumber might bill several hundred dollars on one call. A cleaner may bill under a hundred dollars for a visit, and a crew has many cleaners. Software that charges per head takes a bigger bite out of that margin.

Move the slider to the number of people who need a login. Pick a plan and a billing mode and the calculator shows the monthly cost. It runs in your browser.

The calculator covers the two vendors that price by user and plan tier. ServiceM8 and GorillaDesk have no per-user price, so the number to watch there is your job count or your route count.

A Solo Cleaner

One user fits Jobber Core at $29/mo billed yearly or Housecall Pro Basic at $59/mo. ServiceM8 Free costs nothing for one user and 30 jobs a month, and Starter is $29/mo for 50 jobs.

A Crew of 3

On the cheapest route that fits, Jobber costs $87/mo billed yearly ($29 for 1 user + 2 × $29 = $87/mo). Housecall Pro costs $149/mo, on the Essentials plan. That is $29 per user a month per cleaner on Jobber and $49.67 per user a month on Housecall Pro.

A Crew of 8

At eight, Jobber costs $229/mo billed yearly and Housecall Pro costs $299/mo on Max. Per cleaner that is $28.63 per user a month and $37.38 per user a month. On a per-job or per-route tool, the same eight cleaners add nothing to the bill by themselves.

Why Per-User Pricing Hurts Cleaning Crews

Three things stack up against cleaning crews on per-user tools.

• Many people. A cleaning business often has more field staff than a trade of the same revenue, so the per-seat price multiplies.
• Low revenue per person. One cleaner’s day may bring in less than one technician’s single job, so each seat is a larger share of the margin.
• Turnover and part-time staff. If you hire and replace cleaners often, you pay for seats you fill and empty, and you do the admin each time.

You have three ways to push back. Pick a tool that prices by job or route and not by person. Give logins only to the people who need them, such as crew leads, and have the office schedule the rest. Or pick the tier that fits your crew exactly, so no seat sits empty. The calculator above shows which route is cheapest for your headcount.

Free Options

A free plan is enough for a solo cleaner with a small client list, and it is a fair way to learn what you need before paying. ServiceM8’s Free plan at $0/mo covers one user and 30 jobs a month. Everything else on this page offers a free trial instead: 14 days at Jobber, Housecall Pro, ServiceM8, GorillaDesk and Joist, none needing a credit card.

A trial is not a free plan, so plan for the day it ends. Put a real week of recurring clients through it, note which features you used, and price what you need. For a wider list of free tools, see free field service software, and to price your own crew across tools use the software cost calculator.

Free vs Cheap

If a free plan hits its limit in month three, the cost of switching is your time. A paid plan that fits for a year may be cheaper than moving twice.

How We Chose and Priced These Tools

Every price on this page comes from the vendor’s own pricing page, read on 9 and 10 November 2026. We do not use review sites, reseller quotes or search engine summaries as a source for a price. Where a vendor does not publish a number, we do not print one.

We left ZenMaid out because we have not read a price from its pricing page. If we add it, it will carry a date and a source like the others. Check ZenMaid’s own site if cleaning is all you do.

What We Did Not Test

We did not test features for this page. Recurring scheduling, checklists and route tools vary by plan, so the questions in the residential and commercial sections are the ones to take into a trial. Run them on a live week of your own clients, not a demo.

Next Step: Send an Invoice Today

Software is for the long run, but you can bill a client well today. Our cleaning invoice template gives you a clean invoice you can fill in and download as a PDF. When your volume justifies a subscription, you will already know what you need from the tool. Compare plan costs with Jobber pricing and our software cost calculator.