Fully Booked alternative — without the setup fee
Last checked 4 August 2026
Fully Booked publishes a setup cost of around $2,500 plus roughly $500 a month. We're $49 a month with no setup fee. That gap is real, and it isn't because one of us is ripping anyone off — we do narrower things.
Their figures are quoted from their own published guide, dated. Check before you buy.
What does Fully Booked cost?
From their own published guide, read on 1 August 2026:
Setup cost “around $2,500 AUD”, ongoing cost “$500 AUD/month”. They describe the category generally as typically costing “between $1,000–$2,000 per month plus setup”.
Ours is $49/month for up to 30 caught conversations, $99 for 80, $300 for 250. No setup fee, month to month.
Prices change — check getfullybooked.au before you buy rather than taking a competitor's word for it.
Why does it cost that much more?
Because it's doing a harder thing. Fully Booked is a voice product — it answers the phone in a synthetic voice and integrates with job management software like ServiceM8, SimPRO, AroFlo and ServiceTitan.
That needs configuring, scripting, voice-tuning, testing against your job types and wiring into your systems. That's consulting work and somebody has to do it. The setup fee isn't greed — it's labour.
We do a narrower thing: text the caller back, work out the job, hand you the lead. Less setup because there's less to set up.
What does the $2,500 actually change for a sole trader?
It changes what you're deciding, more than what you're paying. A $2,500 setup plus $500/month means roughly $8,500 committed in year one, and about five months of subscription spent before the thing has answered a single call.
If it turns out not to suit you, that setup money is gone.
For a crew of six with real call volume and a job-management system to integrate, that's a reasonable trade. For a sole trader who wants to stop losing the odd job, it's a lot of commitment before you know whether it works.
Ours goes the other way deliberately: you don't pay until it catches you a real job. No clock, no setup fee. If it never catches you one, you never pay us anything. That's us carrying the risk instead of you.
When is Fully Booked the better buy?
- You want deep job-management integration. If jobs need to land in ServiceM8, SimPRO or AroFlo automatically, that's what the setup fee buys. We hand you a lead and a one-tap calendar drop — not the same thing.
- Your callers use landlines. A landline can't receive an SMS. Voice reaches them; we don't.
- Emergency work, or older customers who won't text.
- You have the volume to justify it. At real crew scale, $500/month against the admin hours it removes can be straightforward maths.
When are we the better buy?
- You're a sole trader or a small crew, and $8,500 in year one isn't a casual decision.
- You want to find out whether this helps before committing anything.
- Your callers are on mobiles and will happily text.
- You'd rather ring the customer back yourself with the job details in hand than have an AI book it.
- You don't want a synthetic voice representing your business at all.
One thing on their numbers
Their guide runs the sum most of this industry runs: average job value $450, monthly lost revenue $9,000. We don't publish figures like that, because it only works if every missed call was a job — and yours weren't. Suppliers, wrong numbers, robocalls, people who'd already booked someone else.
Nobody selling you this software knows your ratio, us included. That's why we built a leak test that uses your numbers instead of ours, runs entirely on your phone, and tells you to buy nothing if the answer is zero.