Guide · Software & systems
Nobody sells you a price.
They sell you a pricing model.
What builder software costs in Australia, and why two products with similar headline figures can produce very different bills. The models this category charges on, what sits outside the headline, what moves as the business grows, and the published figures with the date each was read.
Written by Brad Caldon, Founder, VIABUILD. Licensed builder (NSW) · Registered Building Practitioner (Class 1 to 9) · B.Construction Management (Hons)
01 / The models
Six ways this category charges
Comparing two quotes is usually not the hard part. The hard part is that the two quotes are measured on different axes, so the cheaper-looking one is only cheaper for a particular shape of business, and nothing on either pricing page tells you which shape. Six models cover almost everything sold to Australian builders.
Per user, per month
The most common model in the wider software world and the easiest to read. It is also the one that changes character fastest: a rate in the forties of dollars looks like the cheapest thing on any pricing page and stops looking that way somewhere around the fifth or sixth login. The practical effect is worth naming. A per-user price creates a small argument every time somebody new needs access, and the estimator, the supervisor or the bookkeeper who loses that argument is now re-keying numbers that already exist somewhere.
Per job, or per build
Rarer, and the only genuinely variable model on this list. You pay for each home you start. It has an appealing logic, because the cost lands on the job that carries it and a quiet quarter is a cheap quarter. The edge to watch is the same one as per-user pricing, one step further along: it puts a price on putting a job into the system, and the job you hesitate over is almost always the small one, which is the job most likely to leak margin while nobody is watching it.
Per active project, in bands
A middle position: unlimited users, but the tier steps according to how many jobs you have running at once. This tends to suit a builder with a large office and a steady job count, and it produces a surprise for the builder who wins three jobs in a month. Bands step rather than slope, so the number worth pricing is not today's job count but the count at your busiest point in the year.
Tiers capped by head count
Tier pricing where the cap is people rather than projects, often with usage limits attached to the lower tiers on things like takeoffs, estimates or storage. The cap is the part to read carefully, because crossing it moves you a whole tier rather than adding a seat, and the usage limits are what actually decide which tier you need.
Tiers, with the newer features priced on top
A published tier ladder where certain capabilities, most often the document-reading and estimating assistants, are separate monthly add-ons. This is the fastest-moving part of the category in 2026. It is a defensible way to price something with a real per-use cost, but it does mean the headline tier and the configuration you would actually run are two different numbers, and the second one is the one to compare.
One platform price, or no published price at all
At one end, a single subscription covering the whole product with a stated number of users and a published rate above that. At the other, vendors who publish nothing and quote against modules, users or construction volume. Neither is a red flag on its own. A flat price is simple to forecast and only good value if you use what is in it. A quote genuinely varies for some products, but it moves the burden of comparison onto you, so ask for it in writing and itemised.
02 / The figures
What is published, and when it was read
Only figures each vendor publishes on its own current public pages, in the vendor's own currency and the vendor's own tax wording, with no conversion and nothing taken from a comparison site. Ordered by pricing model, in the order above, which is not an order of price. Each product links to its comparison page, where the detail lives.
| Product | How it charges | What the vendor publishes | Users and projects | The vendor’s tax wording | Read on |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Tradify pricing | Per user, per month, on three published tiers | Lite at $48 AUD per user a month. Pro at $52 AUD per user a month. Plus at $62 AUD per user a month, which is the tier that carries the vendor’s SmartTools AI features. A Custom tier is named with no figure, quoted by phone. Add-ons are priced separately: an Instant Website at $19 a month, and SMS at $0.20 a message. | Priced per user, so every login is a billing input. | The vendor states its figures are AUD per user per month, ex GST. | 19 September 2026 |
| ClickHome pricing | Per job, with volume licensing above it | Cloud (SaaS) "from $225 /job". The enterprise tier is described as per-build licensing that scales with volume, with no figure published. | Not published alongside the figure. | Not stated on the vendor’s page. | 19 September 2026 |
| Wunderbuild pricing | Four tiers, banded by the number of active projects | Starter at $123 a month, for one active project. Premium at $249 a month, for two to ten active projects. Platinum at $375 a month, for eleven to twenty active projects. Ultimate at $499 a month, for unlimited active projects. | Unlimited users on every tier. Projects are banded. | All prices are in Australian Dollars (AUD) and include GST. | 19 September 2026 |
| Built Simple pricing | Tiers capped by head count, with a free tier and an AI allowance per tier | Freemium at $0, with no card required. Tradie at AU$79 a month, or AU$756 a year, up to 5 employees. Builder at AU$199 a month, or AU$1,908 a year, up to 15 employees. Pro at AU$399 a month, or AU$3,828 a year, with no employee cap. An OHS module is named at $99 a month as an add-on, marked coming soon. | Up to 5 employees, up to 15, then no cap, depending on the tier. | The vendor states prices are in AUD and that additional taxes may apply. | 19 September 2026 |
| Buildxact pricing | Three tiers, with the AI features sold as separate monthly add-ons | Foundation at $199 a month, or $169 a month billed annually. Pro at $399 a month, or $339 a month billed annually. Master at $599 a month, or $509 a month billed annually. Blu AI features are priced on top: Estimate Generator and Takeoff Assistant at $99 a month each, Estimate Reviewer at $149 a month. A Recipe Assistant is also named. | Unlimited users on every tier. | All base plans and add-ons exclude and are subject to GST, where applicable. | 19 September 2026 |
| Databuild pricing | Not published. Quoted directly by the vendor. | No figure is published on the vendor’s site, so there is no Databuild price for us to state, and any figure you find on a third-party comparison site is someone else’s guess about a quote we cannot verify. Ask for the quote in writing, itemised by module and by user, before comparing anything. | Not published. | Not stated on the vendor’s page. | 19 September 2026 |
| VIABUILD pricing | One platform price, with users included and a published rate above that | Business plan at $555 a month, the whole platform, with three users included and additional users at $65 a month each. Annual at $5,994, a 10% saving against monthly, on a twelve-month non-refundable commitment. Self-serve entry is seven days free, then a first month at $299. | Three users included, then a published rate per extra user. Projects unlimited. | All figures in Australian dollars and inclusive of GST. The monthly plan has no lock-in. | 19 September 2026 |
Each row was read on the vendor's own pages on the date in the final column, and VIABUILD's row was verified against our VIABUILD pricing page on 19 September 2026. Published prices change without notice and several of these vendors publish no tax wording at all, so confirm the current figures and the GST treatment with the vendor before deciding anything. Where a vendor publishes no figure, this table says so rather than repeating one from an aggregator.
Sources, in row order: Tradify, Tradify pricing (AU) (19 September 2026); ClickHome, ClickHome (19 September 2026); Wunderbuild, Wunderbuild pricing, Wunderbuild on the Xero App Store (19 September 2026); Built Simple, Built Simple pricing (19 September 2026); Buildxact, Buildxact pricing (AU), Buildxact accounting integrations (19 September 2026); Databuild, Databuild (19 September 2026).
This page states what each vendor publishes. It makes no claim about which product is better value for any particular builder, because that depends on your head count, your job count and which of these tools you would actually stop paying for, and those are numbers only you have.
03 / The extras
What sits outside the headline
Six lines that routinely separate an advertised monthly rate from a first-year total. Most are legitimate work rather than a trick, which is exactly why they need adding up rather than arguing about.
Getting set up
Implementation, configuration and training are the most common line that is not in the headline. Sometimes it is included, sometimes it is a one-off fee, sometimes it is a day rate. It is also the line most likely to be quoted verbally and never written down, which is the part that matters, because it is the difference between a monthly price and a first-year total.
Moving your data in
Suppliers, cost codes, price books, assemblies and templates have to arrive from somewhere. A vendor who does it for you is doing real work and may well charge for it. A vendor who hands you an import template is charging you in hours instead. Neither is wrong, but only one of them shows up on an invoice.
The modules you assumed were in it
Safety and inductions, client portals, document control and field apps are all sold as core by some vendors and as modules by others. The word to watch is “platform”, because it is used both ways. Price the list of things you actually intend to stop paying for elsewhere, not the list on the brochure.
AI, metered or bundled
This is the newest split in the category and the one moving fastest. Some vendors price document reading, takeoff assistance and estimate review as monthly add-ons on top of the tier. Others include them. A per-document or per-credit meter is worth understanding before you buy, because it prices the behaviour you were hoping to encourage.
Connectors and integrations
An accounting integration is occasionally a paid connector rather than part of the product, and sometimes the charge sits with a third-party middleware service rather than with either vendor. Ask which party bills you for the Xero or MYOB link, and ask before you have committed to anything else.
Support, once the honeymoon ends
Support is usually included at the level that answers questions and charged at the level that fixes your configuration. The distinction only becomes obvious the first time you need the second kind. Ask what is included, what is billable, and what the response time is on a Friday afternoon in your own time zone.
04 / Over time
The bill moves when the business does
Every model above is a bet on which part of your business will grow. That is the single most useful way to read a pricing page, and it is almost never how they are read.
Take a builder doing six homes a year with three people in the office, going to twelve homes and five people over two years. Under a per-user model the bill rises with the two new hires and ignores the extra six homes. Under a per-job model it roughly doubles and barely notices the hires. Under a banded project model it steps once, at whatever point the concurrent job count crosses a band, and then sits flat again until the next band. Under a flat platform price it does not move at all. Four defensible models, four very different bills, from one growth story.
Which is why the arithmetic that matters is not a comparison of today's prices. It is each candidate priced against your own business in about eighteen months, using your own numbers. That takes twenty minutes on paper and it changes the ranking often enough to be worth the twenty minutes.
There is a second cost that grows faster than any of them and appears on nobody's invoice. Every seam between two disconnected tools is a place where a number gets typed twice, and the hours spent re-keying quantities into budgets, budgets into orders, approved variations into claims and claims into the ledger scale with the number of jobs rather than the number of subscriptions. That is the subject of the Reconstruction Tax, and for most growing builders it is larger than the licence line it sits beside. It is also the reason a straight price comparison between a platform and a stack of point tools tends to flatter the stack.
One honest caveat in the other direction, since we sell one of these. A single connected system is only better value if you genuinely use what is in it. A builder who wants estimating alone, and has no intention of running claims, procurement or safety through the same system, will find a good point tool better value than any platform, including ours.
05 / In writing
Lock-in and data export, before you sign
Six things to have answered in writing rather than reassured about verbally. Ask them of us as readily as of anyone else, and prefer a demonstration to an assurance on the last two.
- 01
Ask for the total first-year figure, itemised
Not the monthly rate, and not a range. Subscription, implementation, migration, training, modules, connectors and any metered usage, on one page, with the GST treatment stated. Any vendor who prices honestly can produce this in a day. The exercise is useful even when the answer is good, because it makes the assumptions visible on both sides.
- 02
Ask what the rate is in month thirteen
Introductory pricing is ordinary and is not a warning sign by itself. What matters is whether the standard rate is written down somewhere you can point to later, and whether it is the rate you are contractually moving onto. A discount whose end state is unstated is not a discount, it is a deferred negotiation.
- 03
Establish whether the term auto-renews, and on what notice
A twelve-month term in exchange for a discount is a fair trade and should be described as one. The questions worth resolving in writing are whether it renews by itself, what notice period applies, what happens if you need to reduce seats mid-term, and whether a mid-term downgrade is possible at all.
- 04
Ask what leaves with you, object by object
Not “can we export”, which is almost always yes. Ask which objects come out and in what format: jobs, budgets, purchase orders, supplier invoices, progress claims, variations, contacts and documents. A summary report is not an export, and a PDF of a table is not your data. Get the list in writing and keep it with the contract.
- 05
Run the export yourself during the trial
This is the single most useful thing on the list and almost nobody does it. Ask to run the export during the evaluation rather than being told it exists, then open what comes out. The moment you actually need an export is the moment your leverage is at its lowest, which is precisely the wrong time to discover its shape.
- 06
Ask how a price change reaches you
Published prices in this category move. What you want to know is the mechanism: how much notice you get, whether a mid-term increase is possible, and whether an annual commitment holds the rate for its term. This is a reasonable question, it has a short answer, and a vendor who cannot give you one has told you something.
The reason these belong at the start of an evaluation rather than the end is structural. Everything on this list gets harder to ask the further you go, and impossible to act on once your data is inside somebody's system. The software evaluation checklist covers what to do in the demo itself, and choosing construction software covers the criteria behind the shortlist. Both are written to be used against every vendor you talk to, including this one.
06 / FAQ
Common questions.
There is no single answer, because the category does not price on a single axis. The published figures read on 19 September 2026 and set out in the table above run from a per-user rate in the forties of dollars a month, through platform subscriptions in the low hundreds to the high hundreds a month, to a per-job charge and an enterprise tier quoted by volume. Two of those models produce a fixed bill and three of them produce one that moves with your business, so the useful question is not the headline number but which axis the price sits on and where your business sits on that axis a year from now.
Mostly because the products are not the same size. A per-user job-management tool for trade and service work and a residential building platform that carries estimating, procurement, claims and safety are doing different amounts of work, and the prices reflect that before anything else. The second reason is that the figures are not stated on the same basis: some are tax-inclusive, some tax-exclusive, some silent, some per user and some per platform. Put them on one basis before you read anything into the spread.
It depends on which dimension you are growing along, which is worth being specific about. If head count is growing faster than job count, a per-user model gets expensive first. If job count is growing faster, a per-job or per-active-project model steps up first. If both are growing, a flat platform price is the one that does not move. None of this makes any model wrong. It makes the model a forecast, so run it against the shape of your business in twelve months rather than the shape of it today.
Implementation and training, data migration, modules that were assumed to be core, AI features metered separately from the tier, occasionally an integration connector, and the higher tier of support. None of these is improper and several represent genuine work. The problem is arithmetic rather than ethics: a headline figure that excludes five of them is not comparable with one that includes them, and the gap is usually largest in the first year.
Both, and some say nothing at all. Among the figures in the table, one vendor states its prices include GST, two state theirs exclude it, one says additional taxes may apply without specifying, and two publish no tax wording beside their figures. At these price points the difference is material, so normalise before comparing: a tax-inclusive headline sitting beside a tax-exclusive one will make one product look closer to or further from the other than it is. Where a vendor states nothing, the honest thing is to ask rather than to assume.
Usually because the quote genuinely varies, by modules, by users, by construction volume or by the amount of implementation involved, and a single published figure would be misleading. That is a legitimate position rather than a red flag. What it does mean is that the burden of comparison shifts onto you, so ask for the quote in writing, itemised, with the first-year total and the ongoing annual figure shown separately. Prices quoted on third-party comparison sites for these products are somebody else’s quote from an unknown date and are not a substitute.
Often enough that a date matters more than a number. Every figure in the table above carries the date it was read on the vendor’s own page, and each links to that page so you can check it yourself. Treat any published figure, including ours, as correct on its stated date and confirm it with the vendor before you make a decision on it. Figures found on comparison sites, in roundup articles or in an AI answer without a date and a source are not evidence of anything.
07 / Keep reading
Related guides & resources
The criteria behind a shortlist, the checklist for the demo, and what the move itself involves.
Our own price is published, and it is on one page.
What VIABUILD costs, what a single platform price includes, and what moves it. Read it beside whatever else is on your shortlist.