Most business software is priced per user, per month. For an office team, that model is easy to understand. Ten people use the system, you pay for ten seats.
Field operations don’t look like that. A typical operation has a small office and a much larger group of people out on sites, roads and streets: drivers, technicians, inspectors, storekeepers, helpers and subcontractors. Add the supervisors who approve their work, the clients who want to see it and the vendors who supply it, and the number of people who should touch the system is many times the number who sit at desks.
Under per-user pricing, every one of those people is a cost line. So companies make a quiet trade-off. They license the office, and leave the field on paper.
How Per-User Pricing Decides Who Gets Access
Nobody sets out to exclude the field team. It happens one budget meeting at a time.
The first licenses go to managers, planners and finance, because they run the reports. Supervisors come next, sometimes. The people doing the work are last in the queue, and they are also the largest group, so they are the first to be cut when the quote comes back.
What follows is familiar. Drivers share one login. Technicians fill in paper forms and hand them in at the end of the week. Photos arrive over chat with no link to a job. Someone in the office retypes it all into the system that was meant to save time.
The software is still there. It just runs on second-hand information.
The Cost of Leaving the Field Out
Every step between the event and the system loses something. Detail goes first: the note that said “lid broken” becomes “bin checked.” Then time: a problem seen on Monday reaches the office on Friday. Then trust: when a customer disputes a delivery, there is a signature on paper somewhere, but nobody can find it.
Data captured at the source works the other way. The person who saw it records it, at the moment it happened, with a photo, the GPS location and the time attached. It reaches the office in minutes. A problem becomes a task straight away. Finished work is ready to bill the same day, with proof attached.
That only works if the people in the field are on the system. Per-user pricing makes that the expensive option. We wrote more about why this matters in why field-first.
Who Else Gets Priced Out
The field team is the biggest group, but not the only one a seat count discourages:
- Supervisors and approvers who need to sign off a permit or a purchase order once a week.
- Clients who want to see the status of their jobs instead of calling for an update.
- Vendors who submit quotes, delivery notes or bids.
- Health and safety staff who review observations and incidents across sites.
- Seasonal or contract workers who join for a project and leave when it ends.
Each of these people uses the system lightly, but their part matters. When an approver is missing, documents stall. When a vendor can’t submit a quote through the system, it arrives by email and gets compared by hand.
Pricing on the Work Instead
The alternative is to price on what the system actually handles. At Fieldmaster.ai, customers pay for activity, not people. Depending on the app, that means:
- Items or assets under management
- Journeys or deliveries
- Purchase orders
- Permits or forms submitted
You can see how this works for each solution. City waste management is priced per bin under maintenance. Utility meter programs are priced per meter under management. Fleet is priced per vehicle, purchasing per SKU, HSE per site and facilities per asset.
Users aren’t counted in any of them. Field crews, supervisors, office staff, clients and vendors all use the same system, and adding one more person costs nothing. Giving the whole field team access becomes the default, not a budget decision.
This also means cost follows the size of the operation. Start with one district, one depot or one store, and the price grows as the work does, not as the headcount does.
How a Fieldmaster Price Is Built
Our commercial model has two parts.
A one-time setup fee. It is a fixed price, quoted in the proposal as a number of working days. It stays low because each app is built on a platform that already exists. More than 95% of every app is the platform itself, already proven in production, so the setup covers the part that is specific to your process.
A yearly subscription, priced on activity. It includes unlimited users, approvers and viewers, plus hosting, support, maintenance and AI usage. There is no separate charge for voice fill or photo AI.
How the subscription is set depends on what you know about your volumes:
- Known volumes: a fixed yearly fee, with a rate for any use above it.
- Unknown volumes: a unit rate with a minimum yearly commitment.
Either way, the number on the invoice follows the work your operation does. Our pricing page explains the model in more detail.
Where Per-User Tools Make Sense
Per-user pricing isn’t wrong everywhere. Some tools are excellent at instant, self-serve forms for a small team, and if you need a simple checklist for five people by this afternoon, a per-user form builder may be the right choice.
The model starts to hurt when the tool has to cover a whole process, from the field to approvals, stock, invoices and reports, and when most of the people involved are in the field. That is the situation most operations are in.
Questions to Ask Before You Sign
Whichever vendor you choose, a few questions show how the price will behave as you grow:
- What happens to the price when we add the field team? If the answer is “it multiplies,” expect pressure to leave people out.
- Are clients, vendors and occasional approvers charged as users? They often are.
- Is AI included, or sold as credits or add-ons? Voice and photo features are most useful to field staff, so their cost matters most at field scale.
- What is the price based on, and can we predict it? A measure tied to your operation, like assets, orders or permits, is easier to forecast than a headcount that changes every season.
- Who pays for changes after go-live? Processes change. A price that looks low can grow fast if every new screen is a partner project.
Put Everyone on the System
The field is where the business actually happens. A pricing model that charges for every person who joins will always push you toward leaving the field out, and the office will keep running on late, incomplete information.
Pricing on the work removes that trade-off. If you’d like to see what your operation would cost with every user included, talk to us and we’ll put together a quote built around your volumes.
