How pricing works
Second Brain has a fixed price. For Missing Piece, we agree on the workflow and give you a fixed quote before work starts. The range below describes typical builds.
Two offers, with scope agreed first
| Offer | Price | Timing | What you get |
|---|---|---|---|
| Second Brain | $2,500 CAD fixed | About one week | We ingest every document your firm has. Your private assistant answers from that history. Your Second Brain credit rolls into a Missing Piece build when it starts within 90 days. |
| Missing Piece | From $5,000 CAD. Most builds reach $10,000 CAD. | Three to six weeks | We build one custom workflow around the tools you use, such as QuickBooks Desktop, ERPNext, spreadsheets, or email. You get a handoff doc and own the finished system. |
Hosting
We bill hosting at cost, up to $100 CAD each month. There is no retainer.
Changes after handoff
Each feature costs $200 CAD. A feature is one agreed change to the finished workflow, with a written result you can check. For a request with several features, we list each one and the total price for your approval before work starts. We never charge by the hour.
What each band covers
Second Brain has one clear job. We take in every document your firm has and set up a private assistant that answers from your history. About one week is the expected delivery time. We review the archive and confirm the handoff date with you before work starts.
Missing Piece starts at $5,000 CAD. Most builds stay within $10,000 CAD. Your workflow may involve a quoting rule, dispatch board, accounts receivable check, or report that your current tools leave to somebody's hands.
A full dispatch, quoting, invoicing, and document archive system carries more work than a scheduling board linked to QuickBooks Desktop through qbXML. We write the exact workflow into the scope, then give you a fixed quote. The published range describes typical builds. Your written quote sets the price for your job.
What sets your Missing Piece quote
How many systems have to talk to each other
The cheapest shape is one tool, built from scratch, standing on its own. Price climbs the moment it has to reach into something you already run, like QuickBooks Desktop over the Web Connector, an existing CRM, a phone system or a payment processor. We scope and price each of those on its own, because none of them is a checkbox.
How much of your history has to move
Second Brain brings your documents into a searchable archive. A Missing Piece that moves invoice balances or job records into another system also needs those records reconciled. That work can take weeks. We describe the reconciliation in your Missing Piece quote so you can see what the workflow needs beyond the document archive.
How many roles need different permissions
One person using one tool is easy. Give that tool an admin, an office coordinator and a technician who each see a different slice of the same job, and both the design and the testing get heavier. A technician's screen has to hide pricing that an office coordinator needs to see, and we test that split directly rather than trust it to hold on its own.
How much the mistakes cost if we get it wrong
Money math, invoice numbering and overtime rules get the hardest testing on any build, because a bug in one of them takes money straight out of your account. We write a case for every rate, holiday and rounding rule the tool has to get right before it's allowed near a live invoice. Testing at that depth takes hours, and hours are the biggest input into any quote we write.
Whether it needs to run unattended, on a schedule
Recurring and contract billing, GPS-flagged auditing and scheduled reports all have to keep running correctly with nobody watching them. That takes more design up front than a tool somebody drives by hand every time.
The shapes an engagement takes
A fixed-scope build
You can already describe the problem. Dispatch runs over a group chat, quotes come out of a Word template, and somebody re-types a paper form into QuickBooks at the end of the day. We write down the exact deliverable, you agree to it in writing, and we quote one fixed price against it. Most of our work looks like this.
A phased build
Bigger systems get cut into stages. Each stage carries its own written scope and its own sign-off, so you're never staring at one enormous price with a single delivery date somewhere at the end of it. A recurring-contract billing engine can wait until the work-order and invoicing flow is live and your office uses it daily, then get built as its own phase.
After handoff
You own the finished system and get a handoff doc. Hosting is billed at cost, up to $100 CAD a month. Later changes cost $200 CAD per feature. There is no retainer, and we never bill those changes by the hour.
What discovery looks like
We want the problem in your own words. The most useful thing anyone has ever sent us was a client's requirements email, written in plain language about how their office ran day to day. It listed which fields had to be mandatory, which numbers somebody added by hand every week, and which conversation with the crew had already gone badly once. That email shaped the build, and its price, more than any spec we could have written for them.
So discovery is you walking us through how a job moves today. What sits on paper, what lives in a spreadsheet, what gets re-typed a second time, what falls over when the office manager is on vacation. We ask for your tools by name, because "integrate with your accounting software" and "integrate with QuickBooks Desktop over the Web Connector" are two different jobs at two different prices.
Out of that conversation we write a scope in plain language, covering what gets built and what stays out of it. You get a fixed quote against that scope before anybody writes code. If halfway through discovery it turns out an off-the-shelf product suits you better, we tell you so and stop there.
What we won't do
- ×Start building before the scope is on paper and you have agreed to it. A conversation you half-remember won't hold up in month three.
- ×Pretend a published band covers work we haven't seen. Your written scope sets the quote before code starts.
- ×Put support on a retainer. Hosting stays at cost, and you choose which later features you want us to build.
- ×Recommend a custom build when an off-the-shelf product is honestly the better buy. Read the section below, we mean it.
- ×Keep your code or data after handoff. The finished system is yours.
When a custom build isn't the right answer
We researched off-the-shelf field-service software and landed on Jobber as the better product for a small crew, on pure feature-for-dollar terms. Jobber's Connect plan runs about $105-149/month for a 5-user bracket (annual billing, year-one promo to renewal rate). Housecall Pro sits around $149-189/month and ServiceTitan around $1,000-2,000+/month before add-ons, checked 2026-08-28, with an implementation fee on top and a multi-year contract that reviewers commonly describe as substantial. We couldn't verify a specific fee amount or contract length ourselves. If your shop needs standard scheduling, invoicing and dispatch, with no odd rule a generic product can't already handle, a monthly subscription to one of those tools will very likely cost you less over five years than a custom build, and it comes with a vendor support line we cannot match.
Custom work pays for itself when your business runs on a rule no generic product handles out of the box: automatic overtime worked out under two non-stacking rules, with the reason printed in plain text on the signed document, or GPS auditing that only ever fires on a deliberate tap because a covert version was a deal-breaker the last time it was tried, or a two-role permission model where a machine checks that a technician's screen carries zero dollar figures instead of trusting a template to hide them.
Your existing subscriptions stay in your budget. Add the custom build, hosting at cost when we host it, and any later features you choose. Judge that added cost against the work it saves or makes possible. A subscription cost disappears only if you retire that tool.
Work the numbers yourself
The calculator and the price research the numbers above came out of.
Cost of Per-Seat Software Calculator
Add your current software costs to the project and hosting budget over the years you choose.
Tool
Field Service Software Prices in Canada: The Five-Year Maths
We checked the 2026 prices for Jobber, Housecall Pro, FieldPulse, Zuper and ServiceTitan, then ran the five-year maths.
Guide
Compare Your Options
Side-by-side write-ups, including the jobs where the off-the-shelf product beats what we would build.
Comparisons
Talk through your scope, no obligation
Bring your paper forms and your spreadsheets, or bring nothing and describe what keeps going wrong. We'll tell you honestly whether a custom build makes sense for you before we quote a number.
Send us your scope