I am the COO here, so job costing is a subject I have some sympathy for. Most trade businesses do not know which of their jobs made money until well after they could have done anything about it, and Fergus is genuinely good at closing that gap.
So this is not a piece about Fergus being weak. It is about two costs that sit either side of the thing it does well.
Per-user, plus timesheets
Fergus is priced per user, from around $53 per month, and timesheets are an additional cost rather than part of the base.
Per-user pricing behaves the same way everywhere: it is fine small and it is a straight line upward. What is worth noticing here is the interaction with timesheets. Job costing is only as good as the labour data feeding it, and the labour data comes from timesheets. So the feature that makes the costing trustworthy is the one sitting outside the base price.
That is a reasonable commercial decision on their part. It just means the configuration that delivers the value you are buying Fergus for is not the configuration in the headline price, and you should price it properly before comparing.
For reference on our side: $99 a month ex GST for a one-person office, $79 per admin seat for a team, crew seats free and not counted toward your tier, and seats a builder invites you into are free.
Takeoff comes from somewhere else
Fergus does not do takeoff natively. It comes via a Groundplan integration.
Integrations are fine until they are not. A second subscription, a second login, a second place where rates can drift out of step with the first, and a support conversation that involves two vendors when something does not line up. If you price off drawings regularly, that is friction on the most repetitive part of your week.
Build Paperless includes AI estimating and takeoff from plans in the base trade plan. Upload the drawings, get measured quantities, apply your rates.
The gap before the job exists
Here is the structural point, and it applies to Fergus, Tradify, simPRO and ServiceM8 equally.
All four are very good at the job once the job exists in the system. Fergus in particular will tell you exactly what it cost you.
None of them help with how the job got there.
If you work for builders, the job starts as somebody else's drawing set and somebody else's scope. Someone in your office reads an email, interprets the scope, and creates the job by hand. Then the scope changes, and that change arrives as a phone call or a message, and it gets into your system only if someone remembers.
Job costing tells you accurately that a job lost money. It does not tell you that it lost money because a variation was agreed on site in week three and never written up. By the time the costing report is accurate, the argument is already lost.
Build Paperless connects the builder to you directly. Assigned jobs and RFQs come into the same account you run your own quoting, scheduling and invoicing from, and the variation trail is shared with the person who has to approve it. That does not replace job costing. It stops one of the main reasons the costing comes out bad.
Who should stay on Fergus
If you are a plumbing or electrical business doing mostly your own work, direct to customers or through long-standing maintenance arrangements, and your central question is per-job profitability, Fergus is a good fit and I would not move you off it for the sake of it. There is a 14 day trial and plenty of Australian trades run it happily.
Who should look
If a growing share of your revenue arrives through builders, run this test. Take your last ten builder jobs and work out how many hours went into re-entering scope, chasing approvals, and writing up variations after the fact.
Multiply that by your charge-out rate. Compare it to the difference in subscription cost between any two products on this list.
For most trade businesses doing builder work, that number is not close.
Price it out properly. Include timesheets, include takeoff, then compare. Start a 14-day trial or see the trade comparison.