As COO I spend most of my week on one question, and it is the same one builders ask me. What does this actually cost, and what am I locked into.
That is a harder question to answer about Buildertrend than it used to be, because Buildertrend stopped publishing its pricing.
Unpublished pricing is a signal, not an accident
Software companies publish prices when the price is a reason to buy, and stop publishing when it is not.
Buildertrend quotes on build volume now. You go through a sales process, you get a number, and that number is specific to you. You cannot put it in a spreadsheet next to two competitors on a Sunday night, which is exactly when most builders do this comparison.
I am not going to pretend that makes it expensive. I do not know what they will quote you and neither does anyone else writing about it, which is the point. But it does mean the comparison work shifts onto you, and it means the price you are quoted has been set with knowledge of your turnover.
Our own comparison table lists Buildertrend as "Custom" for exactly this reason. We will not put a hard dollar figure against a price the vendor does not publish. Anyone who does is guessing.
The Australian compliance gap
Buildertrend is a competent residential platform. Variations, client portal, progress claims, subcontractor management, document storage, Xero integration, daily logs. All there, all decent.
It is also American, and it shows in the places that matter here.
No HIA or MBA contract management. No HBCF or home warranty tracking. No state-specific progress payment stages. Your data is not hosted in Australia.
For a builder in NSW that means the Home Building Act payment stages you have to claim against live outside your management system. For a Victorian builder it means the domestic building insurance side sits somewhere else. You end up running Australian compliance in parallel to the software you bought to run your jobs, which defeats a fair bit of the purpose.
If you are a CoConstruct customer
CoConstruct has been discontinued and its customers are being migrated across to Buildertrend.
Worth pausing on that. You chose CoConstruct. You are being moved to a product you did not choose, on a timetable you did not set. Whatever the migration is like, you are changing systems either way.
That makes it the right moment to look at the whole market rather than take the default. The switching cost you were worried about is being incurred regardless. The only question left is which product you land on at the end of it, and accepting the automatic migration is a decision, not the absence of one.
What we do differently on price
I will be plain about our side so you can compare like for like.
Build Paperless publishes its prices. $99 a month ex GST for a one-person office. $79 per admin seat once you have a team, with tiers at two to four seats and five to nine. Site foremen are a flat per-person add-on and crew seats are free, and neither pushes you into a higher tier. Fourteen day free trial, no lock-in contract.
Your bill tracks your admin headcount. It does not track your turnover. If you have a big year, that is your money, not ours.
The trade relationship
One structural difference worth understanding before you sign anything.
On Buildertrend, a trade contractor who wants their own quoting and invoicing takes out a separate subscription. It is not connected to your jobs. They are a contact in your system.
On Build Paperless a trade has their own account with their own quoting, crew scheduling and invoicing, and receives your assigned jobs and RFQs into it. Seats you invite them into are free to them. That means the RFQ you send and the quote that comes back are the same record rather than two attachments in a thread, and the variation you both signed is one audit trail.
If a decent share of your headaches are subcontractor coordination rather than internal admin, that difference does more for you than any feature on either list.
The fair summary
Buildertrend is a real product with a real Australian user base and I am not going to tell you it does not work. Plenty of builders run it happily.
What I would say is this. If you are comparing options, insist on a written quote and the renewal terms before you invest time in a demo, because volume-based pricing has a habit of moving. And weigh the compliance gap honestly, because the spreadsheet you keep alongside the platform is a real cost even though it never appears on an invoice.
Compare it properly. Our pricing is on the website, all of it. See the full comparison or start a 14-day trial with no credit card.