Guide
Maintenance agreements: the feature that decides your tier
Updated
For most HVAC contractors the maintenance agreement base is the business, and reactive callouts are what happens in between. That makes agreement handling the feature that should pick your software, and it is priced further up the ladder 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 it sits in the price ladder
Housecall Pro is the only vendor of the five publishing recurring service plans as a named feature, and it places them on its top MAX tier at $299 a month rather than 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The other four do not publish agreement handling as a named feature at any tier, which does not mean it is absent; it means you cannot price it without a call.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 that were never booked is the part that fails quietly, and 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 by asking 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 rather than sample data. The failure modes here are all in the edges: a site with four units on two different agreements, a customer who defers a visit, an engineer who does the work but forgets the readings.