Guide
HVAC service agreement software: the feature that decides your tier
Updated
For most HVAC contractors, maintenance agreements are the business and callouts fill the gaps. Agreement handling should pick your software; it sits higher up price ladders than most buyers expect.
Talk to a specialist Five US HVAC platforms set against the EPA Section 608 duties, what each publishes, and the questions no vendor has answered in public.
Where HVAC service agreement software sits in the price ladder
Housecall Pro is the only vendor of the five publishing recurring service plans as a named feature. It places them on its top MAX tier at $299 a month, not on Basic at $59. A maintenance-led firm therefore cannot buy the entry plan, and the honest entry price for that vendor is five times its headline.
The other four do not publish agreement handling as a named feature at any tier. That does not mean it is absent; it means you cannot price it without a call.
Housecall Pro service agreements
Housecall Pro publishes recurring service plans as a named feature on its MAX tier at $299 a month, billed annually, and not on Basic at $59 or Essentials at $149. So the Housecall Pro plan a maintenance-led firm needs is the top one, and that is the figure to compare against vendors who only quote on a call.
Generation is the part that breaks
Recording that a customer has an agreement is easy. Generating next season's visits, assigning them to a route, and flagging the ones never booked is the part that fails quietly. It fails a year after you buy.
Test it by setting up an agreement in a trial and moving the system clock forward, if the vendor will let you. Or ask to see a live account where next year's visits already exist. A description is not a demonstration.
Agreements and compliance are the same record
The planned visit is when refrigerant readings get taken, so the agreement schedule and the Section 608 asset history should be looking at the same equipment record. If maintenance visits live in one place and refrigerant logs in another, somebody will reconcile them by hand at exactly the wrong moment.
Ask to see an appliance's full history on one screen: install, agreement visits, refrigerant added, leaks, repairs and verification tests. That single screen is the product for an HVAC firm.
What the trial should cover
Two weeks is short for a maintenance-led business, because the thing you most need to see is a renewal cycle you cannot reach. Kickserv's 30 days gets closer; ServiceM8's permanently free tier at 30 jobs a month lets you keep a slice of real work in a system indefinitely while you decide.
Whatever the window, run real agreement customers through it, not sample data. The failure modes are all in the edges. Think of a site with four units on two different agreements, a customer who defers a visit, or an engineer who does the work but forgets the readings.