What your booking app, CRM and invoicing tool really cost you per year
The monthly price on the pricing page is the smallest part of the bill. A worksheet for adding up seats, add-ons, price rises and the hours spent copying data between apps.
Published 3 min readModulyth Systems
Most owners can tell you roughly what their booking app costs a month. Far fewer can tell you what their whole stack costs a year. Almost nobody counts the hours their team spends making those tools work together.
This guide is a worksheet. Grab your last few card statements and fill it in as you read. Every number here should be yours, not an industry average.
Step 1: List every subscription, not just the big ones
Start with the obvious tools, then go looking for the quiet ones. A typical service business ends up paying for some mix of:
- A website builder or hosting plus paid plugins
- An online booking or scheduling app
- A CRM or customer list tool
- Quotes and invoicing software
- Forms and intake (questionnaires, waivers, onboarding)
- Email marketing
- Automation glue that connects the others
- Reviews and reputation tools
- Job or field-service management
Search your card and bank statements for the last three months. Annual plans hide well, so check the past year for one-off renewals too.
Step 2: Multiply by seats, today and next year
Many tools charge per user. Write down the price per seat, then multiply by:
- The seats you pay for today
- The seats you'll need after your next two hires
Per-seat pricing means every hire raises several bills at once. If you're planning to grow, the second number is the one that matters.
Step 3: Add the add-ons and tier jumps
The headline price is often the entry plan. Look for:
- Feature gates: the automation, reporting or integration you need is "available on Pro"
- Usage limits: contacts, bookings, emails sent or SMS credits that push you up a tier
- Payment fees on top of your card processor's fees, charged by the tool itself
- Paid integrations between two tools you already pay for
Write down what you'd pay on the plan you actually need, not the one advertised.
Step 4: Count the hours spent gluing tools together
This is the cost nobody invoices you for. Every week, someone on your team:
- Copies a booking into the CRM, or a customer into the invoicing tool
- Chases an unpaid invoice by hand
- Rebuilds a report from three exports and a spreadsheet
- Fixes a double-booking or a missing record
Estimate the hours per week honestly, then put a price on an hour of that time: a staff wage, or what an hour of your time is worth when it could be spent selling.
The formula is simple:
| What | How to work it out |
|---|---|
| Monthly admin cost | hours per week × hourly cost × 52 ÷ 12 |
| Monthly software cost | sum of every subscription at the plan you really need |
| Annual total | (software + admin) × 12 |
| Three-year total | annual total × 3 |
Why 52 ÷ 12? Because a month is about 4.33 weeks, not 4. Using 4 quietly understates the cost by about 8%.
Step 5: Look at the three-year number
Monthly prices are designed to feel small. Multiply your annual total by three and look at it next to the question: what do I own at the end of it?
With rented software the answer is nothing. Stop paying and the data, the workflows and the history go with the subscription. That isn't automatically bad. Some tools are genuinely worth renting. But it's worth deciding on purpose.
What to do with the number
You now have a real figure. A few honest ways to use it:
- Cancel what you don't use. Most stacks have at least one tool kept "just in case".
- Consolidate overlapping tools. If your booking app and your CRM both store customers, one of them is redundant.
- Price out owning it. Compare your three-year total with the one-time cost of a system built around how you work, plus its running cost. Sometimes renting wins. Sometimes it really doesn't.
Do the maths in two minutes
Our cost calculator does steps 1–4 for you: tick the tools you pay for, edit each price to match your bill, add your admin hours, and it shows the monthly, yearly and three-year total. It only uses your numbers. Nothing of ours is subtracted.