How much does it cost to replace WorkPal with your own system?
WorkPal charges ~£38/seat/month: a 44-engineer team pays over £20,000 a year for job scheduling, a mobile app, digital forms, and invoicing. A custom replacement covering the same scope typically costs £32,000–£42,000 to build in total. Split across a founding cohort of five firms, each pays ~£6,000–£8,000 upfront, then a flat ~£3,000 a year to run — no per-seat, ever. Payback on the build contribution lands inside 18 months for a 20-engineer team.
What does WorkPal cost over 5 years?
At ~£38/seat, a 20-person team pays ~£45,000 over five years — before any headcount growth or price increases.
WorkPal's publicly listed price is ~£38/user/month. A 20-engineer firm pays ~£9,100 in year one; with a 10% annual licence increase and modest headcount growth, that bill exceeds £55,000 over five years. The per-seat model means every new hire directly increases the annual cost.
What does a WorkPal replacement cost to build?
Total build: £32,000–£42,000, shared across ~5 co-funders at £6,000–£8,000 each.
WorkPal's core is job scheduling, a mobile technician app with offline support, digital forms, photo upload, time tracking, and client invoicing — a clean rebuild scope. Shared across a founding cohort of five UK field-service firms, each pays £6,000–£8,000 upfront — roughly what WorkPal costs for four months for a mid-size team. After that, one flat annual fee covers everything.
Why WorkPal is particularly replaceable
WorkPal's architecture is a scheduling database, a mobile field app, and a digital forms engine — a focused scope that a targeted rebuild handles well.
WorkPal is our anchor example. An independent UK case study documented a field-service firm cutting from ~£12,000/year on WorkPal to ~£3,000/year with a custom build — payback under one year. The feature set is precisely 'a database plus a form plus a dashboard plus a mobile app', as Forbes described the per-seat rent trap. Nothing requires proprietary algorithms or deeply embedded integrations.
Related questions
Yes. An iOS and Android mobile app with full offline support is part of the core WorkPal replacement scope. Your engineers use your app, with your custom forms and branding.
Sources
- WorkPal pricing as published (yourworkpal.com, 2025)
- Anchor case study: UK field-service firm cut ~£12k/yr to ~£3k/yr with a custom build; payback ~1 year (Rollout IT, 2024)
- Forbes: "If a product is essentially 'a simple database plus a form plus a dashboard,' customers will ask why they are paying recurring fees."
See what your SaaS spend looks like with a flat annual fee.
Enter your seat count and current monthly price. The calculator uses real build-cost estimates and shows you the five-year crossover.