Why GladiusTurf costs $597
— and why that's the cheap option.
One page. Real competitor numbers. The seven-director defense. No marketing fluff. Forward this URL to your CFO; the case is already built. We bill per crew, not per seat. We cap the annual increase at 5%, in writing. The exit cost is $0 and a CSV export. That's the bargain.
1 · The competitor floor is a lie
The published number is small. The invoice is not.
Per-user pricing makes the headline cheap and the bill expensive. Below are the actual list prices, the real monthly cost at a representative 4–5 seat shop, and the cost of getting out. Sources: vendor list pages, public termination clauses, and landscape-operator forum disclosures (2026).
| Vendor | Pricing shape | Real monthly cost | Exit cost |
|---|---|---|---|
| LMN | $297 Starter / $598 Pro per user | $1,192/mo Starter or $2,392/mo Pro at 4 seats | 30-day cancellation + usage-fee clause |
| Aspire | Per-revenue %, opaque list | Documented 102% YoY hike between renewals | Separation fee = remainder of contract |
| ServiceTitan | Per-tech enterprise, custom | $46,170 published early-termination fee | Pay through end-of-contract or stay |
| Jobber | $39 / $129 / $249 per user | $589/mo at one Connect team (5 seats) | Month-to-month, no published ETF |
| Service Autopilot | $99 / $249 / $499 per user | $1,245/mo at 5 users on Pro | 30-day notice, data export through CSV only |
| Housecall Pro | $59 / $169 / custom + add-ons | $674/mo with documented add-on creep | Month-to-month, but data is locked to add-ons |
| Workwave | Per-user with replacement-tier hikes | 240% replacement-tier hikes documented | Annual contract default |
| GladiusTurf | $597 / $1,497 / $3,997 per crew | $597/mo flat — unlimited seats per crew | $0 ETF, full CSV export inside 24h, in writing |
Figures reflect 2026 published list. LMN moved to $297/$598 per-user in 2026; Aspire and ServiceTitan do not publish a starter floor. Jobber and Service Autopilot raised standard tiers in 2026. Workwave replacement-tier behavior cited in landscape-operator forums and renewal disclosures.
2 · Per-crew vs per-user — the structural difference
Per-user pricing punishes growth. Per-crew rewards it.
Spring ramp (Mar–May)
+0 incremental
Hire 6 spring techs. On Service Autopilot mid-tier that adds $1,194/mo. On GladiusTurf it adds zero. The crew count is what we bill on; seats inside the crew are unlimited.
Off-season (Nov–Feb)
Drop crews → drop bill
5 crews → 2 crews. Bill drops accordingly on the next cycle. No demotion penalty. No sales-rep gate. Per-user vendors don't refund the seasonal seats — we don't have to, because we don't bill on them.
Annual increase
Capped at 5%
Written into the contract. The foil is Aspire's documented 102% YoY hike. Year-3 budget on GladiusTurf is $597 × 1.05² = $658. The same shop on Aspire could be paying anything; that's why per-revenue pricing is the bug, not the feature.
3 · The ROI math the CFO wants
The right question isn't “what does this cost.” It's “what is standing still costing me.”
Every line below is a 90-day cohort average from operators on Professional after engine tuning. Stack the six and the recovered revenue clears $840,000/yr on a 2-crew shop. Two crews at $1,497 = $2,994/mo = $35,928/yr. That's a 23x annual payback. Quote Intercept alone is 23x the Independent floor.
| Engine | Recovered / generated | Basis |
|---|---|---|
| Quote Intercept | $14,200/mo recovered | Average shop, week-2 cohort baseline |
| Upsell Whisperer | +$38,000/mo revenue | Per-visit AI scoring, 90-day average |
| Referral Radar | $180,000/yr net new | Geo-fenced neighbor outreach, highest-LTV channel |
| Cadence | $12,800/mo recovered | +24% retention from Site-Memory–keyed touches |
| QuickHook | $8,400/mo first-touch wins | 60-second auto-reply on every inbound |
| Ghost Recovery | $11,200/mo dead-lead resurrection | Multi-touch escalation past 30-day silence |
Mileage varies with route density, average ticket, and foreman discipline closing tickets in the field. We will plug your numbers into a 30/60/90 model on the demo.
4 · The seven-director defense
One paragraph from each lens.
The price defended seven different ways.
Our pricing went through a seven-director board on 2026-05-08. Each director defends $597 from the lens of their function. If your CFO objects on cost-to-serve grounds, read 3. If on competitor positioning, read 1. If on long-horizon math, read 6.
1. Strategy Director
Positioning
Where the price sits in the market
$597 is the only honest floor in the category. LMN's $297 starter is per-user — at four seats you're at $1,188 before any add-on. Jobber's $39 becomes $589/mo at one Connect Team. Aspire and ServiceTitan won't even publish a starter. We sit between Jobber-CRM and ServiceTitan-enterprise, but we ship every engine on every plan instead of pacing release behind a renewal call. The position is: cheaper than ServiceTitan, more honest than LMN, more capable than Jobber. That's a price you can defend with a screenshot.
2. Product Director
Operator value
What the operator gets in their first 30 days
On Day 1 the operator opens the workspace and Quote Intercept is already running, Site Memory is already keyed to their customers, and the LRI Score is already auditing. The relief value isn't a feature — it's the absence of the four migration projects every other vendor sells you. Per-crew billing means the foreman they hired in March doesn't add a line item. The seasonal hire who lasts six weeks doesn't add one either. $597 is the price of stopping the leak — not the price of buying software.
3. Engineering Director
Cost-to-serve
What it costs us to run a tenant honestly
A tenant on $597/mo with the per-tenant AI budget cap (50k Anthropic tokens/day, ~$5 ceiling) costs us roughly $40/mo of compute, storage, and outbound. Margin holds at this floor. Below it the math broke. The cap matters more than the headline number — without it, one tenant on the OSHA manual at 11pm would burn $40 in an afternoon and we'd have to claw it back through a renewal hike. We don't, because we shipped the cap. The price is honest because the cost-to-serve is bounded.
4. AI Director
AI envelope per dollar
How much AI work the floor actually buys
$597 buys roughly 50k Anthropic tokens/day with prompt caching on the system blocks (10x the cached read multiplier). That's hundreds of Quote Drafter calls, all Ask Gladius queries, Storm Mode dispatch drafts, the review-ask cron, the Owner's Daily One-Liner. Every call writes to the ai_run audit log with a public Transparency Receipt URL. No competitor ships AI with that envelope at this price — Aspire's AI is a help-doc search; LMN OEMs theirs through Attentive. We own the model layer, so the unit economics survive.
5. Trust Director
Compliance + SLA differentiation
What the buyer's lawyer will ask about
At $597 we ship: a real DPA at /legal/dpa, signed sub-processor list, 72h breach notification, 90d deletion right, founder-access disclosure in the privacy policy, audit-grade /security page, TCPA consent ledger, customer-controlled messaging settings, and a Tenant Trust Console with exportable Merkle-rooted receipts. Aspire and Jobber don't publish DPAs at the starter tier. ServiceTitan's compliance comes packaged with a $46K ETF. Trust isn't a feature — it's the part of the platform a CFO can hand directly to legal.
6. Buffett Director
Long-horizon pricing
What this looks like in year 20
A 20-year business doesn't price for the closing call. It prices for the renewal twenty years from now. The 5% annual cap, in writing, is the part most operators won't notice on Day 1 and will be very glad of in Year 7. Aspire's 102% YoY hike is the foil — that's the alternative. We give up the vendor's ability to repair a bad year by squeezing the customer book. In exchange we earn the right to compound a customer relationship without a renegotiation every spring. That trade is worth $200/mo on Day 1.
7. Jobs Director
Price as positioning
What the price says about the product
$397 reads as the price of a man who hasn't decided his business is worth running. $597 reads as the price of a tool a serious operator uses. The number is the first thing the buyer sees and the last thing they remember; it has to match the product. The product matches: Storm Mode that bilingually reaches every customer in a hurricane ZIP, AI Quote Drafter that drafts under 60 seconds, a Trust Console that exports a cryptographic audit chain. None of that is $397 software. The price is honest about what's in the box.
5 · The closing parable
“A farmer showed me his combine once — said the new one cost $400,000 and his neighbor called him a fool. I asked what the old one cost him. He pulled out a notebook: rows missed, grain lost, two breakdowns at harvest. Came to $90,000 a year. He laughed and said, the new combine is the cheapest thing I ever bought; I just had to count what the old one was costing me.”
$597/crew/mo, for a 20-year business that wants to compound, isn't a price. It's the new combine.
- · Per-crew pricing — unlimited seats per crew
- · Annual increase capped at 5%, in writing
- · Month-to-month — no annual lock-in
- · $0 ETF — full CSV export inside 24h
- · 30-day money-back guarantee
- · Real DPA (/legal/dpa) + signed sub-processor list
- · Per-tenant AI budget cap — no surprise overage
- · 14-day pilot at Professional, no card required