Cleaning Business Software UK 2026: What It Really Costs a Five Cleaner Firm

Last Updated on September 9, 2026

Jobber advertises $49 a month. For a cleaning company with five cleaners and an owner it is $194 a month.

Powered Now advertises £28 a month. Same firm, same six logins, £168 a month plus VAT.

Neither company is hiding anything. Both say “per user” on the page. But the number in the headline is the number for one person, and no cleaning business with staff has one person.

We read the live pricing page of every tool a UK cleaning firm might plausibly use, on 20 August 2026, and worked out what each one costs a five cleaner round. Here is what we found.

The mistake: comparing headline prices

Software pricing in this trade comes in three shapes, and they are not comparable to each other.

Per seat. You pay for every login. The headline is one login.

Flat with a job cap. Unlimited people, but a limit on how many jobs a month you can book. This is the shape that catches domestic cleaning rounds, because a round doing three cleans per cleaner per day blows through a fifty job allowance in the first week.

Flat with no cap. Rare, and usually more expensive at the front door.

Pick the wrong shape for your business and you can pay four times more for the same job. The rest of this piece is working out which shape fits which cleaning business.

What per seat actually costs at six logins

Five cleaners plus an owner. Prices as published on each vendor’s own page.

Two of those deserve a second look.

Housecall Pro charges $100 a month for the sixth person. One extra login costs more than most complete plans in this list.

Okappy has a five user minimum and wants the year up front. The smallest possible commitment is £2,340 plus VAT, so £2,808, paid before you start, plus configuration from around £100. The trial is three days.

The other trap: job caps, not seat caps

ServiceM8 does the opposite. Users are unlimited and free. What it meters is jobs.

This is where the type of cleaning business decides everything.

A domestic round with five cleaners doing roughly three cleans a day over 21 working days is around 315 jobs a month. Starter and Growing are both too small. You are on Premium at £119.

A commercial contract cleaner with eight office sites cleaned nightly might log those as recurring contracts rather than 160 separate jobs, and sit comfortably on Starter at £25 with the same five cleaners.

Same headcount, same revenue, five times the software bill, decided entirely by whether your work is many small jobs or few big ones. No comparison table will tell you that. Count your own jobs first.

How many actually publish a price

We checked around 32 products. Only about half publish a complete, readable price on their own site.

There is a pattern in the first row worth naming. Three of the six that publish nothing are British field service platforms: Commusoft, BigChange and Klipboard. Australia’s Simpro is the fourth. The American tools mostly print their prices. The British ones mostly ask you to book a call.

Commusoft at least publishes its terms while withholding its price: twelve month contracts, billed monthly, direct debit required, prices exclude VAT. BigChange publishes no tiers, no prices and no contract length, and the only figure on its pricing page is a marketing claim about customers saving £5 for every £1 spent.

The currency problem nobody mentions

Cleaning specific software is almost entirely American. ZenMaid, Launch27, Automaid, CleanGuru, Swept, Janitorial Manager, BookingKoala, Jobber, Housecall Pro and Connecteam all price in dollars. Jobber’s page says “All prices in USD” and offers no currency selector. Connecteam says “All prices on our website and product are in USD only.”

That is fine as far as it goes. What none of them mention is the reverse charge.

GOV.UK’s guidance on when to register for VAT lists, inside your taxable turnover, “services you received from businesses in other countries that you had to reverse charge”. A UK cleaning firm sitting below the £90,000 registration threshold and spending $250 a month on American software is adding roughly £2,300 to £2,400 a year of reverse charged services to its own taxable turnover.

Not one dollar priced vendor says so on its pricing page. Jobber and Housecall Pro both reference United States sales tax and nothing else.

We are not accountants and this is not tax advice. It is a thing worth asking yours about before you sign up, particularly if you are near the threshold. We covered the same trap across the wider software market in what 27 vendors actually charge UK buyers.

One more currency note. Clean Calculator’s domain now redirects to CleanManager, which is a Euro priced, per seat, per module product with a €400 data import fee and €120 an hour training. If you were looking for Clean Calculator, that is where you end up, and it is a different product on a third currency.

A stack that works, in pounds

For a five cleaner domestic round, all published prices, all available in GBP.

Compare that with Jobber Connect at six users on $284 a month plus a rota tool plus accounts, or Payaca, whose cheapest published plan is £299 a month and is limited to newly incorporated businesses with eight or fewer employees. Everyone else starts at £1,199.

Two things in that table are worth pulling out.

Connecteam is free for life up to ten users, with all hubs and all features. For a five cleaner firm it is the single biggest cost avoidance available, because it removes the rota and time tracking line entirely. The “all features” claim carries an asterisk on their page that we could not resolve, so check it covers what you need before you rely on it.

Direct Debit beats cards for recurring work. GoCardless Standard is 1 per cent plus 20p capped at £4. On a £120 clean that is £1.40 against £2.00 on a standard Stripe card payment. Across 315 jobs a month that is about £189 a month, roughly £2,270 a year, which is not small at all. Direct Debit also removes expired card chasing, which matters when your customers pay you fortnightly forever.

And if you bank with NatWest, RBS, Ulster Bank or Mettle, FreeAgent is free for life, which takes the accounts line to zero. That is conditional on keeping the account, and Mettle needs a transaction a month.

What the headline price leaves out

Also worth knowing: Deputy’s cheapest tier is pointless at five people. Lite at £3.25 a user comes to £16.25, which falls under Deputy’s own £20 minimum monthly spend, so you pay £20 either way. It only starts saving money above about seven users.

And ignore the introductory discounts when comparing. Xero is showing 80 per cent off for six months, FreeAgent 50 per cent off, QuickBooks 90 per cent off. Judge them on the standard price, because that is what you will pay in month seven.

The two systems a cleaning firm actually needs

They get sold together and they solve different problems.

• Workforce and time. Who is on which site, did they arrive, did they stay, and did cover get arranged when they did not. This is where a cleaning contract is won or lost operationally.
• Work order and asset management, which is the CAFM end, and matters when you are delivering facilities management rather than cleaning alone.

A firm with twenty sites and a cover problem needs the first. A firm managing reactive maintenance across a client’s estate needs the second. Buying a CAFM platform to solve a rota problem is an expensive way to be disappointed.

Work out which problem is costing you more before you shortlist anything. Missed shifts, unarranged cover and disputed hours point to workforce and time. Reactive maintenance, asset registers and client work orders point to CAFM. Few firms need both on day one.

What we would actually do

Start

One to two cleaners. ServiceM8 free at 30 jobs, or Starter at £25. Connecteam free. Zoho Invoice free, or FreeAgent free if you bank somewhere that gives it to you. Total: nothing to £25 a month.

Do not buy a job management system before you have enough jobs to manage. A shared calendar and a spreadsheet genuinely works until about the point you hire your second cleaner.

Build

Three to eight cleaners, which is where 83 per cent of this industry lives. Count your monthly jobs before you choose anything. Many small domestic jobs points to ServiceM8 Premium at £119 or ZenMaid Pro at $39. Few large recurring commercial contracts points to ServiceM8 Starter at £25 and keeping the difference.

Move recurring domestic customers onto Direct Debit here. It is the single change that most improves cash flow in a cleaning business, and at 1 per cent capped at £4 it costs almost nothing.

Scale

Ten or more, multiple sites, commercial contracts with audits and compliance. This is where the demo gated platforms start to be worth the phone call, because at that size the per seat maths turns against you and you need things the small tools do not do. Get the annual cost in writing before the demo ends, and ask specifically about onboarding fees, contract length and what happens to your data if you leave.

The sharp takeaway

The advertised price is for one person, and you are not one person. Before you compare anything, count two numbers: how many logins you need, and how many jobs you book a month. One of those two decides your bill, and which one depends on whether you clean many houses or a few buildings. A five cleaner firm can run a complete stack for about £162 a month, and the rota software in it is free.

Method

Around 32 products checked on 20 August 2026 by reading each vendor’s own live pricing page. Prices are quoted in the currency the vendor publishes, because no vendor publishes an exchange rate and card rates vary. Where a vendor publishes no price, that is recorded as not published rather than estimated.

Software comparison and review sites were used only to discover which products exist. No price in this article comes from one, because they are frequently stale and frequently paid.

The five cleaner scenario assumes five cleaners plus an owner, and roughly three jobs per cleaner per day over 21 working days, which is around 315 jobs a month. That job volume is our modelling assumption for illustration, not a researched industry average. Your own number is the one that matters.

Whito

Whito is an independent UK research bureau. We ask the AI engines what they recommend, then check the businesses they name against Companies House and the sector registers. Figures we publish carry the date they were checked. Companies cannot pay to appear or to rank.

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