Quoting Apps for Australian Tradies

What a job quoting app has to do in five minutes on site

Describe the job. Get an itemised list of materials and labour, not a blank form. Price the materials at what they cost this week. Add GST and your ABN. Send it as a branded PDF by email, SMS or WhatsApp before you leave. Let the customer accept it online. Chase it if they go quiet.

That is the whole test. Run each app on this page through it with a real job, a fence, a hot water swap, a switchboard, and time it. The apps built for quoting finish in two minutes. The platforms built for job management finish in ten, because quoting is a form inside a bigger system.

In QuoteMate the description is the input: type or say the job and the app suggests the line items, applies live supplier pricing, adds labour and GST and produces the PDF. Typical trade quotes run from $150 to $200,000 and the flow is the same.

At a glance

Materials pricing is the difference between a quote and a guess

Across the trades QuoteMate is built for, the quotes that get revised after sending are the ones where a material price moved between quoting and ordering. That is the pattern live supplier pricing exists to stop. A quote priced off a list you built in March is a guess with a date on it.

QuoteMate pulls live Australian supplier pricing into line items, and for plumbers and gasfitters connects directly to Reece maX so every line prices at your real trade-discounted rate, with ordering from inside the accepted quote. Of the other five apps here, none pull live supplier prices; they quote against lists you maintain. That is not a flaw in what they are, it is the difference between a quoting app and a job management app with a quote form.

Add a validity period to every quote, thirty days is standard, so a price that moves after that is the customer's problem to re-accept rather than yours to absorb.

Quoting app for builders: when you need takeoffs instead

If you build from architectural plans, a quoting app is the wrong category. You need estimating software that does digital takeoffs, measuring quantities off the drawing, and that is Buildxact: desktop-first, from $169 a month, built for residential builders and large renovations.

QuoteMate does not do takeoffs and does not pretend to. It is for the tradie on the tools, including builders quoting a bathroom or a granny flat from a site visit rather than a plan set, where the job is described and itemised rather than measured off a PDF. Builders doing both often run both: Buildxact for the estimate, a quoting app for the service and renovation work.

The six quoting apps, honestly

QuoteMate. Quoting-first for Australian sole traders and small crews. AI-assisted line items, live supplier pricing, Reece maX for plumbers, branded PDFs, GST and ABN, online acceptance, automatic chasing, one-tap invoice, Square tap-to-pay, Xero sync. Free plan with unlimited quotes and invoices; Pro is a flat $49 a month or $490 a year. Not for crew dispatch, timesheets or takeoffs.

Tradify. Job management for small crews with quoting attached. Timesheets and dispatch are the strength. From $48 per user per month.

ServiceM8. Job cards, forms and scheduling for iPhone-based teams, quoting included but manual. Free tier for very low volume, then from $29 a month.

Fergus. Job costing for plumbing and electrical firms with office staff. From $53 a month. Manual quoting against your own price list.

Buildxact. Estimating from plans with digital takeoffs, for builders. From $169 a month. The right tool for its job and the wrong one for a service tradie.

Quotient. A clean, general online quoting tool used across many industries. From US$28 a month, priced in US dollars, with no trade materials or Australian supplier pricing. Fine for a service business that is not in the trades.

What a quoting app costs

QuoteMate free, or Pro at $49 a month (about $41 a month paid annually at $490), flat for the business. ServiceM8 from $29. Tradify from $48 per user. Fergus from $53. Buildxact from $169. Quotient from US$28, which moves with the exchange rate and is not GST-inclusive.

For a crew of three, the per-user options multiply and the flat ones do not. For a sole trader the deciding cost is not the subscription; it is the one job a quarter that gets under-quoted because a material price was stale. That is worth more than a year of any app on this list.

How QuoteMate quotes a job, start to finish

Describe the job in plain words, typed or spoken. The app drafts the line items: materials, quantities, labour, callout if there is one. Live supplier pricing fills in the material costs; for plumbers, that is your Reece trade rate. Adjust anything, add your margin, and the GST is calculated per line. The branded PDF goes out by email, SMS or WhatsApp and the customer accepts online. Accepted, it moves into the job pipeline and, when the work is done, becomes the invoice in one tap.

If you want to see the line items a good quote carries for your trade before you use any app, the free quote worksheets on this site are blank PDF and Excel versions for 45 common jobs, with no prices filled in. They are a checklist, not a quoting tool; the app is where the pricing happens.

Frequently Asked Questions