BigChange is a Leeds-based field service management platform with genuine operational strengths — all-in-one job management, real-time vehicle tracking, drag-and-drop scheduling, and a reputation for reducing paperwork significantly for UK field service businesses. It holds a 4.5/5 on Capterra across 270 reviews, it’s processed over 78 million jobs, and it’s trusted by businesses across drainage, fire and security, social housing, and plant hire.
But BigChange also has a 2.1 out of 5 on Trustpilot, five-year contract commitments that have resulted in County Court Judgements against customers who tried to leave, and a mobile app that crashes frequently enough to generate ongoing release notes about it.
This is an honest comparison of BigChange and a custom-built business application — what each costs, what each does, and which is the better fit for your business.
What BigChange Actually Costs
BigChange publishes two headline prices:
- Standard — £79.95 per user per month: job management, scheduling, quoting, invoicing, vehicle tracking, customer portal, and dashboards
- Plus — £99.95 per user per month: everything in Standard plus a rugged Samsung tablet or smartphone, device management software, a driver cradle, and free hardware installation
For a ten-person team on the Standard plan, that’s £800/month or £9,600/year in licensing. For the Plus plan with hardware, £1,000/month or £12,000/year.
What isn’t published: setup and onboarding fees, AI dashcam costs, excess data charges (the 500MB SIM included with Plus is described by one reviewer as “virtually impossible to stay within” for photo-heavy workflows), custom document design costs, and Data as a Service fees for raw data exports.
More significantly: the contracts. Multiple Trustpilot reviewers — independently and consistently — report being offered five-year minimum contracts. Early exit requires paying the full remaining contract value. Clause 4.5 of BigChange’s Terms of Trade is unambiguous: all remaining service payments become immediately due. One reviewer received a County Court Judgement for £50,000 plus £4,000 in court fees after attempting to cancel. Another reported prices being “multiplied by 4” after BigChange France was absorbed into the UK entity post-acquisition.
At £80/user/month, a ten-person team over five years pays £48,000 in licensing alone — before setup, hardware, add-ons, or any price increases permitted by BigChange’s right to update its price list “from time to time.”
What a Custom App Costs — and What You Own
A custom business application for a trades or field service business of five to twenty people typically costs from £10,000 to build, with a monthly maintenance retainer of £200–£400 covering hosting, updates, and ongoing development.
For a ten-person team, a custom build at £10,000 with £300/month maintenance costs roughly £38,000 over five years. Compare that to BigChange’s £48,000 licensing cost alone over the same period — plus the difference that a custom build has no lock-in, no early exit penalties, and no vendor with a contractual right to take you to court for leaving.
You own the code. You own the data. If the business changes, the application changes with it. No three-month notice window. No auto-continuation clauses. Retool’s 2026 research found that 35% of businesses have already replaced at least one SaaS tool with a custom build — and the combination of cost and commercial risk is the primary reason.
Features: Where BigChange Excels
BigChange’s genuine strengths are well-documented by its satisfied customers:
- Vehicle tracking — real-time GPS, geofencing, driver behaviour monitoring, and journey history, all hard-wired into every license
- Drag-and-drop scheduling — with an intelligent optimisation assistant factoring in location, traffic, skills, and vehicle type
- All-in-one breadth — CRM, job management, quoting, invoicing, stock management, compliance workflows, and subcontractor management in one platform
- Customer booking portal — with real-time engineer tracking visible to clients
- Paperwork reduction — multiple users report admin time reductions of up to 85% versus previous paper-based processes
For businesses that need fleet management baked into their job management system — drainage companies, plant hire, waste management, social housing contractors — BigChange’s vehicle tracking integration is a genuine differentiator that most competitors don’t match.
Features: Where BigChange Falls Short
The mobile app is BigChange’s most significant weakness. The iOS app holds a 2.7/5 rating on the Apple App Store, with persistent crashes documented in monthly release notes going back over a year. The Android app scores 3.6/5, with complaints about slow performance and intrusive 24/7 background tracking. December 2025 release notes alone documented fixes for crashes when opening tasks, viewing worksheets, viewing photos, navigating to site assets, and signatures not displaying — all reaching production.
Reporting is the other material weakness. Users describe a 91-day maximum reporting window, limited export options (over-formatted .xlsx rather than clean CSV), and financial reporting described as “not up to scratch.” BigChange’s answer is their Data as a Service product — but that requires customers to maintain their own Power BI or Looker infrastructure at additional cost and complexity.
There is also no SLA. BigChange’s terms provide the service “as is” and “as available,” with no uptime guarantee and no compensation mechanism if the platform goes down. The absence of offline capability means that when BigChange servers experience issues, field data can be lost entirely — as one Capterra reviewer confirmed.
And multiple Trustpilot reviewers report a consistent pattern: BigChange is quick to add services but refuses to remove them. The only path to reducing costs, according to several reviews, is signing a new multi-year contract at a lower rate — re-locking the customer in.
Features: What a Custom App Delivers Instead
A custom application is built around your specific workflow from day one. There is no adapting your business to a platform’s structure. There are no features you pay for but don’t use. And the mobile interface is designed for how your engineers actually work in the field — not for a generic field service use case.
When we built a custom application for CME Heating, a heating and plumbing company with field engineers across London, the mobile experience was designed specifically for engineers completing records between jobs on poor signal — not an afterthought bolted onto a web platform. Weekly timesheets, van inspection logs, and mileage records generate automatically. Automated reminders fire on Tuesday for any outstanding submissions. The office sees everything in real time. The admin team stopped chasing paperwork entirely. You can read about our app development service or explore custom business apps we’ve built.
For Luelle Property Group, coordinating contractors across multiple residential renovation sites, we built structured job workflows with role-based access, three-channel notifications (email, SMS, push), compliance document collection built into the submission process, video walkthroughs, and a real-time management dashboard. Everything purpose-built around their process — not a generic platform’s interpretation of it.
For Nestflow, a European fintech company whose deal management workflow spanned four countries and involved sensitive regulated data, we built a secure portal with an 11-stage pipeline, automated credit checks, AI-generated underwriting reports, and full GDPR compliance — a workflow no off-the-shelf platform would have accommodated. Read more about that transformation.
The Contract and Data Risk
BigChange’s commercial model is the source of most of its negative reviews. Five-year contracts with full remaining value payable on exit, auto-continuation requiring three months’ written notice, no published SLA, and a right to update pricing “from time to time” create a commercial relationship that is difficult to exit and difficult to predict.
On data portability, BigChange retains data for 12 months after contract termination before deletion. A “Data as a Service” product exists for data export, but no explicit guarantee of full portability appears in the publicly available terms.
With a custom application, there is no contract to escape. No three-month notice window. No CCJ risk. No vendor with the contractual right to retain your data until you pay a separate export fee. Our post on bespoke versus off-the-shelf software covers what ownership versus tenancy really means for a growing business.
Which Is Right for Your Business?
BigChange is likely the better choice if:
- Fleet tracking is a core operational requirement alongside job management
- You run a 15–50 person field service operation in drainage, plant hire, waste, or social housing
- All-in-one breadth is more valuable than workflow precision
- You’re comfortable with a five-year commitment and have negotiated contract terms carefully
- You’ve verified setup costs, add-on pricing, and data export provisions in writing before signing
A custom business app is likely the better choice if:
- You have 5–20 staff and a workflow that doesn’t fit a generic platform
- Long-term contract lock-in is a concern for your business
- Mobile reliability is critical — your engineers’ time in the field depends on the app working
- Reporting and data access need to be flexible, not constrained by a 91-day window
- You want to own your software and data outright with no vendor dependency
If you want to work through the numbers for your own situation, our post on the real cost of business app subscriptions and our guide on when to replace your SaaS stack are useful starting points.
Isn’t it nice when things just work?
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Frequently Asked Questions
How Much Does BigChange Cost Per Month?
BigChange’s published prices are £79.95/user/month (Standard) and £99.95/user/month (Plus, which includes a tablet and hardware). For a ten-person team on Standard, that’s £800/month or £9,600/year — before setup, excess data charges, or add-on costs.
What Are BigChange’s Contract Terms?
Multiple users independently report five-year minimum contracts as the standard commercial offer. Early exit requires paying the full remaining contract value. Auto-continuation applies after the initial period, requiring three months’ written notice to cancel. Several users have faced legal action for attempting to exit.
Is BigChange’s Mobile App Reliable?
No — this is the platform’s most consistently criticised weakness. The iOS app holds a 2.7/5 on the Apple App Store, with crash reports persisting for over a year in monthly release notes. The Android app scores 3.6/5. For field-heavy operations, this is a significant operational risk.
Does BigChange Have an SLA?
No. BigChange’s terms provide the service “as is” and “as available,” with no uptime guarantee and no compensation mechanism for downtime. The platform has no offline capability — if servers go down, field data can be lost.
How Does a Custom App Compare to BigChange on Cost?
A ten-person team on BigChange Standard pays £48,000 in licensing over five years. A custom build at £10,000 with £300/month maintenance costs roughly £38,000 over the same period — with no lock-in, no early exit penalties, and no risk of price increases.
Can BigChange Integrate with My Accounting Software?
BigChange integrates natively with Xero, Sage 50, QuickBooks, SAP Business One, and Microsoft Dynamics. Notably, Sage Cloud integration is missing — flagged repeatedly by users as a gap. A custom application can be built to integrate with whatever accounting or operational software your business already uses.
