I am a forward deployed engineer, so my instinct with any tool is to ask what it does under load once it is in a real business. Not on day one with three users and a clean database, but at year three with ten people and a few thousand jobs in it.
Tradify holds up fine technically. It is a tidy product and the mobile app is genuinely good. The two things I would look hard at are the pricing curve and one feature that is easy to misread.
Per-user pricing is a growth tax
Tradify charges per user, somewhere in the range of $48 to $62 per user per month depending on the plan.
At three users that is fine. At ten it is a line item you notice. The maths is linear and it never bends, which means every apprentice you put on has a software cost attached before they have turned a screw.
What that does in practice is subtle and worth naming. Teams on per-user pricing start rationing seats. The apprentice shares a login. The bookkeeper uses the office account. Six months later your audit trail says one person did work that four people did, and you have quietly destroyed the thing you bought the software for.
Build Paperless prices on admin seats with tiers, $99 a month ex GST for a one-person office and $79 per admin seat for a team, and crew seats are free and never push you up a tier. More importantly, if a builder invites you onto their job, that seat is free to you. You are not paying to receive work.
Read the Connections feature carefully
This is the one I would check before signing.
Tradify has a Connections profile, and it is free, and it does connect you to builders. The condition is that the builder also runs Tradify.
Go and count how many of the builders who give you work are on Tradify. For most subcontractors the honest answer is somewhere between none and one. Which means that in your actual working life the feature does very little, because your builders are on Buildxact or Buildertrend or a shared drive and a phone.
That is not Tradify being deceptive, it is just how a single-vendor network works. But it is the difference between a feature that exists and a feature that helps you.
On Build Paperless the builder invites you and you get the job, the drawings, the RFQ and the variation trail in your own account. What the builder was using beforehand does not matter, because the invitation is the connection.
Takeoff is the other gap
Tradify's AI is writing assistance and bill capture, and only on the top plan. It is useful. It is not takeoff.
If you price work off drawings, and most subcontractors on builder jobs do, the slow part of your week is not writing the quote text. It is measuring off the plan before you can start pricing at all. Build Paperless includes AI estimating and takeoff from plans in the base trade plan rather than gating it or selling it separately.
Crew scheduling and timesheets are also worth checking on Tradify, since those sit on the Pro plan and above rather than the entry tier.
What Tradify does well
I do not want to be unfair about this, because plenty of trades are happy on it and they are not wrong.
If you run your own jobs for your own customers, if you are quoting from your own head rather than off a plan set, and if your team is small and stable, Tradify is a clean, fast, well-supported product with a 14 day trial and no drama. The interface is better than most of this category. For a two-person electrical or plumbing outfit doing domestic service work, it is a perfectly good answer and switching would be change for the sake of it.
Where the line is
The line is builder work.
If your revenue comes from direct customers, the builder connection is worth nothing to you and you should weigh these products on interface and price alone.
If a serious chunk of your revenue comes through builders, then every job that arrives as an email attachment and gets re-keyed into your system is time you are paying for twice, and every variation that lives in a thread rather than a shared record is an argument you might lose later. That is the part that scales badly, and it scales badly right at the point where you have grown enough that you cannot hold it all in your head.
Work out your own number. Count your users, multiply by the per-user rate, then compare it against seat tiers with free builder-invited seats. Start a 14-day trial or see the trade comparison.