Plumbing Flat-Rate Pricing Software and Price Books Compared

Every plumber has a price for a toilet rebuild. The question is whether that price was built from your real costs or copied from the shop down the road. Flat-rate pricing software gives you a price book: every task you sell, with a fixed price that already covers labor, parts and profit. This guide explains how a plumbing price book is built and compares the two ways to get one: a dedicated flat-rate book or the price book inside your field service app. Prices and features come from each vendor’s official website as of October 27, 2026.

If you’re looking for quoting tools for big jobs (water heaters, repipes, sewer lines), see our plumbing estimating software guide. This one is about the prices themselves.

Flat rate vs. time and materials

	Flat rate	Time and materials
What the customer sees	One price, before work starts	Hourly rate plus parts, after the job
Who carries the risk	You: a slow job costs you	The customer: a slow job costs them
Rewards fast, skilled techs	Yes	No, they bill fewer hours
Arguments over the bill	Fewer	More (“why did it take three hours?”)
Works best for	Repeatable service and repair tasks	Remodels, commercial work, jobs you can’t see

Most residential service plumbers use flat rates for everyday repairs and keep time and materials (with a written estimate) for work that can’t be scoped in advance. A price book doesn’t have to cover everything: start with the 30 or 40 tasks that make up most of your tickets.

How a plumbing price book is built

Every flat price in a book comes from the same three inputs. Software only does the arithmetic and keeps it consistent; the inputs are yours.

1. Your hourly labor rate

This is not what you pay a plumber per hour. It’s what an hour on the job has to bill to cover the wage, payroll taxes and benefits, the truck, insurance, the office, the hours nobody pays for (driving, estimates, callbacks, training) and your profit. Shops that set it by looking at competitors usually undercharge. Our hourly rate calculator works it out from your own costs.

2. Task times

The average time for each task, from arrival to cleanup, including diagnosis and the trip to the truck for a part. Use your own job history if your software records it; if not, time your techs for a few weeks. Ready-made books come with task times, but they are averages from other shops: check the ones you sell most against your own numbers.

3. Materials and markup

Parts at your cost, plus a markup. Many shops use a sliding markup (higher on cheap parts, lower on expensive ones) so a $5 washer and a $900 water heater both earn something sensible. Whatever you choose, the software should update part costs when supplier prices change, or your margins shrink without you noticing.

Putting it together: a worked example

Here’s a toilet fill valve replacement with made-up numbers (use your own):

Input	Example
Hourly labor rate	$150
Average task time	0.75 h → $112.50
Fill valve at cost	$12
Markup (2× on small parts)	$24
Flat price	$136.50, rounded to $139

Do that for every task and you have a price book. The job quote calculator runs the same math for a single job and shows the margin left after all costs, which is a good way to sanity-check a price before you load it.

Good, better, best

A price book also lets you offer options on common repairs, for example: repair the faucet cartridge, replace with a standard faucet, or replace with a premium faucet plus new supply lines. Each option is just a bundle of tasks and parts from the book, priced the same way, so all three earn the same margin and the customer chooses between your options rather than between you and another plumber. Most of the tools below can present options on a tablet; how they do it is covered in the estimating guide.

Option 1: a dedicated flat-rate book

Dedicated providers sell the content (tasks, descriptions, parts, times) as well as the software, which saves you weeks of building. You still customize the labor rate and markup.

Profit Rhino SmartPrice

As of October 27, 2026, Profit Rhino’s SmartPrice page lists Starter at $39, Plus at $49 and Pro at $59 per tech per month. The page lists a pre-built digital flat-rate book with quarterly parts updates and OEM search, a management platform to customize the book (with QuickBooks export and custom option templates), and a mobile sales tool for presenting options, service agreements and financing. Every plan is marked “success coaching & implementation required”, and the page doesn’t publish that fee, so ask for it in writing. Its plumbing page promises you can be “up and running in one day.”

For a three-tech shop on Starter, the subscription is 3 × $39 = $117 a month before implementation.

The New Flat Rate

The New Flat Rate’s pricing page says plans start at $99/month and covers HVAC, plumbing, electrical, chimney and IAQ contractors. It has six tiers (Quick Start, Basic, Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum), all with the pricing app, video training and member suite. Higher tiers add implementation class seats, coaching, technician Q&A support and, on Gold and Platinum, field ride-alongs and office training. Only the starting price is published, and there’s no free trial, only demos. It suits shops that want help selling at flat rates, not just a list of prices.

Aptora Flat Rate Plus Online

Aptora’s Flat Rate Plus Online covers plumbing, sewer and drain cleaning, HVAC and electrical. Its Forever Free plan allows up to 500 flat-rate tasks, 1,000 items and one book; Premium Plus costs $50 per user per month or $420 per year and removes the limits. It includes price calculators and imports of your own pricing data. It’s a tool for building and managing your own book rather than a book of ready-made prices, which makes it the cheapest way to start if you’re willing to enter your tasks.

Option 2: the price book in your field service app

If you already run a field service app, it almost certainly has a price book. The question is whether it does real flat-rate pricing (calculating prices from labor rate, time and markup) or is just a list of items with prices you typed in.

Housecall Pro

Housecall Pro includes a price book on every plan (Basic $79/month, or $59 billed annually) and flat-rate pricing, which builds profit margins into service prices, from Essentials ($189/month, $149 billed annually, 5 users). Its help center says the Profit Rhino-powered price book with HVAC, plumbing, drain cleaning and electrical services costs $199 a month, with quarterly updates, and that setting a default labor rate is “a critical step” because it’s applied to every service in the book. The Sales Proposal Tool is included only in Max ($329/month). There’s a 14-day trial with no card.

ServiceTitan

ServiceTitan is quote-only, priced per technician. Its pricing page lists a Pricebook on all three tiers (Starter, Essentials, The Works). Pricebook Pro, an add-on, gives plumbers supplier catalogs and pre-built flat-rate plumbing services; ServiceTitan says its team monitors supplier price changes and updates prices monthly. Techs can build good-better-best estimates from the pricebook in the mobile app.

FieldEdge

FieldEdge is also quote-only, with no free trial, but pricebook and flat-rate pricing are on all three plans (Select, Premier, Elite). Quotes are single-option on Select and multi-option on Premier and Elite, and Proposal Pro (good-better-best) is included in Elite and a paid add-on on the others.

Jobber, Workiz and Service Fusion

• Jobber ($49/month Core; Grow $299/month for 5 users) doesn’t list a flat-rate price book on its pricing page. Its plumbing page describes good-better-best quotes, optional line items customers can add (on Grow), and Home Depot pricing in quotes.
• Workiz lists a price book on every plan but flat-rate pricing only in Ultimate; prices are on request, with a 7-day trial.
• Service Fusion ($245/month Starter, unlimited users) lists estimate options on every plan but no price book or flat rate in its plan features.

How to choose

Your situation	Start with
No price book and no time to build one	Profit Rhino, or Housecall Pro’s Profit Rhino book if you’re on Housecall Pro
Prices are fine, but techs struggle to sell them	The New Flat Rate
You want to build your own book on a budget	Aptora Flat Rate Plus Online (free plan) or your app’s price book
Already on Housecall Pro, FieldEdge or ServiceTitan	The built-in price book first
On Jobber or Service Fusion	Ask the vendor how they handle flat rate before you buy a separate book

Before you pay for any book, check that it syncs with the field service app you use: a price book that techs can’t open on the job won’t get used. Ask the vendor for a demo with your own 20 most common tasks.

Who this guide is for (and who it isn’t)

For: residential service and repair plumbers moving to flat rate, or tidying up a price book that has drifted.

Not for: new-construction plumbing contractors bidding from plans, who need takeoff and bid software.

The bottom line

A plumbing price book is only as good as the labor rate, task times and markup behind it, so work those out first. Then either buy the content (Profit Rhino from $39 per tech per month, The New Flat Rate from $99/month with coaching) or build it yourself in Aptora’s free plan or your field service app (Housecall Pro from Essentials, FieldEdge and ServiceTitan on all plans). Confirm current prices on each vendor’s site: the figures here come from official pages on October 27, 2026.