For any business that sends people out to do work, trades, facilities management, HVAC, electrical, plumbing, maintenance, installation, inspection, the operational challenge is the same: jobs need to be scheduled and dispatched, field engineers need clear instructions on their phones, and the office needs real-time visibility of what is happening out in the field. Paper job cards, phone calls back and forth, and a shared spreadsheet on a screen in the office stop working the moment you have more than a handful of engineers on the road.
The question, as always for an SME, is not whether to invest in a field service management solution, it is how, and at what cost. This article breaks down three routes: fully custom development, enterprise SaaS platforms (using Salesforce Field Service as the benchmark), and low-code app development using Glide. The gap in cost between these three options is significant, and the implications for an SME are real.
What a Field Service App for an SME Actually Needs
Before comparing costs, it is worth specifying the feature set. A genuinely useful field service management app for a trades or maintenance SME needs to deliver:
- A native mobile app on Android and iOS, installable on engineers' own phones without specialist hardware
- Job scheduling and dispatch, the office assigns jobs to engineers with all the relevant detail attached
- Digital job cards with checklists, notes, and status updates that engineers complete on-site
- Photo capture, before and after photos attached to the job record, not sent over WhatsApp and lost
- Customer signature capture to confirm job completion on-site
- Real-time job status visibility for the office, dispatchers can see which jobs are in progress, completed, or flagged
- A client-facing portal so customers can view job status without calling the office
- Multiple user roles (Administrator, Dispatcher, Engineer, Client) with role-based access control, each role sees only what it needs
- Parts and materials logging per job for accurate billing and stock tracking
This is a practical, commercially useful feature set, not an enterprise wish list. Let us look at what each approach costs to deliver it.
Option 1: Fully Custom Development
The traditional route is to commission a bespoke application built from scratch by a development agency or an in-house team. You own the code, it does exactly what you need, and you are not dependent on a third-party platform.
Build Cost
A native mobile field service app with scheduling, job cards, photo capture, signature capture, real-time updates, a client portal, and full RBAC is a substantial build. You need at minimum a backend developer, a mobile developer, and a project lead or QA resource, a team of two to three engineers working for two to three months.
Realistic build budget: €75,000 – €120,000+
At Irish and Western European day rates (€450–€650 per day for a mid-to-senior developer), a project of this scope takes at least two to three months of elapsed time. Scope creep, integration work, testing, App Store submission, and a backend API layer regularly push the final number toward the top of the range or beyond.
Ongoing Maintenance Cost
Custom software requires continuous maintenance. Mobile operating systems release major updates annually. App Store requirements change. Bugs emerge in edge cases. New features require developer involvement every time. The standard industry estimate is 15–20% of the original build cost per year in maintenance, for a €90,000 build, that is €13,500–€18,000 every year, indefinitely.
| Cost Item | Custom Development |
|---|---|
| Initial build (2–3 engineers, 2–3 months) | €75,000 – €120,000+ |
| Annual maintenance (15–20% of build) | €11,250 – €22,500 / yr |
| 5-year Total Cost of Ownership | €131,000 – €232,000+ |
For the overwhelming majority of Irish field service SMEs, a €75,000+ upfront investment in a software build is simply not viable. You would need to be billing a very significant volume of field service work before the economics of custom development begin to make sense.
Option 2: Salesforce Field Service
Salesforce Field Service (formerly Field Service Lightning, now rebranded as part of the Agentforce platform) is one of the most widely used enterprise field service management platforms in the world. It is genuinely powerful, the feature set is extensive and the integrations are deep. The question for an SME is whether the cost is proportionate to the scale of operation.
What Salesforce Field Service Actually Costs
Salesforce Field Service pricing is role-based, with different per-user monthly rates depending on the licence type:
- Dispatcher licence: $175 per user per month
- Technician / Engineer licence: $175 per user per month
- Field Service Plus (combined dispatcher + technician capabilities): $230 per user per month
- Contractor licence: $55 per user per month (limited access)
Critically, Salesforce Field Service also requires at least one Service Cloud user licence as a prerequisite. Service Cloud starts at approximately $75 per user per month for the Starter tier, rising to $165+ for the Professional tier that most field service operations require.
A realistic SME scenario, 1 dispatcher and 10 field engineers:
1 Dispatcher × $175 = $175/month
10 Technicians × $175 = $1,750/month
1 Service Cloud (required) × $165 = $165/month
Total: ~$2,090/month ≈ €1,930/month ≈ €23,160/year
This does not include the implementation cost. Salesforce implementations are not trivial, configuring the platform, migrating data, training staff, and setting up workflows typically requires a Salesforce partner or consultant, adding €10,000–€30,000 in one-off setup costs.
The Hidden Problem: Fit
Beyond the cost, there is a deeper issue that rarely comes up in a Salesforce demo. Salesforce is an enterprise platform built to serve thousands of different organisations across hundreds of industries. It is necessarily generic at its core, with customisation available, but customisation in Salesforce requires either Salesforce-certified developers or significant configuration time from an admin.
Most SMEs find that their actual workflows need to be adapted to match what Salesforce does out of the box, rather than the other way around. The platform may cover 80% of your needs well, but bridging that remaining 20% often requires expensive consultant time, ongoing admin overhead, or simply accepting that your team must work around the platform's constraints indefinitely.
There is also the question of scale mismatch. Salesforce Field Service was designed for organisations with complex, multi-region operations, large workforces, and dedicated IT teams. Deploying it in a 10-engineer SME is often like using an enterprise ERP to run a corner shop, technically capable, but carrying enormous overhead for problems that do not need that level of infrastructure.
| Cost Item | Salesforce Field Service (1 dispatcher + 10 engineers) |
|---|---|
| Implementation / setup (Salesforce partner) | €10,000 – €30,000 |
| Monthly licence (11 users + Service Cloud) | ~€1,930 / month |
| Annual licence cost | ~€23,160 / yr |
| 5-year Total Cost of Ownership | €125,800 – €145,800+ |
| Ownership at the end | None. Cancel and it's gone. |
Option 3: Low-Code App Development with Glide
A low-code platform like Glide lets you build a fully functional, custom mobile application in weeks rather than months, at a fraction of either of the options above. For field service operations in particular, Glide delivers the features that matter most to the team actually doing the work, built around how your business operates rather than how an enterprise platform expects it to.
What Glide Delivers for Field Service
Glide is particularly well suited to field service workflows because it was built around mobile-first, structured data entry, precisely what field engineers need on a job site. A Glide field service app can deliver:
- Native Android and iOS app, installable directly from a link, no App Store review needed for internal tools
- Job scheduling and assignment, dispatchers assign jobs from a dashboard; engineers see their day's jobs on their phone
- Digital job cards with customisable checklists, notes, and status controls built to your exact workflow
- Photo capture, engineers attach before/after photos to the job record from the camera; stored automatically against that job
- Signature capture, customer signs on the engineer's phone; the signature is stored against the completed job record
- Real-time visibility, dispatchers and managers see live job status in the office dashboard as engineers update it in the field
- Client portal, customers access a read-only view of their job history and status via a secure shared link
- Full RBAC, define Administrator, Dispatcher, Engineer, and Client roles; each sees and can action only what their role allows
- API integrations, connect to accounting systems, CRMs, or any other platform your business uses, via Glide's native integrations or a middleware tool like Make
Cost
A well-specified Glide field service app, with all of the features above, typically costs between €2,000 and €5,000 to design and build, depending on the number of integrations and the complexity of the workflow. The platform subscription for a commercial operation currently runs at approximately €170 per month at the Business tier, with no per-seat charges. A team of five engineers costs the same as a team of twenty.
Small changes stay small. Because the app is built on a maintained low-code platform rather than a bespoke codebase, adding a new checklist item, a new report, a new user role, or a new integration does not require a developer retainer or a change request that takes weeks to action. Many changes can be made by someone on your own team after a brief training session. This is not possible with custom-built software, and it is not affordable with Salesforce.
| Cost Item | Low-Code (Glide) |
|---|---|
| Initial build (custom to your workflow) | €2,000 – €5,000 |
| Monthly platform subscription | ~€170 / month |
| Annual running cost | ~€2,040 / yr |
| 5-year Total Cost of Ownership | €12,200 – €15,200 |
| Per-seat charges | None. Unlimited users. |
The Full Picture: A 5-Year Comparison
| Custom Dev | Salesforce Field Service | Low-Code (Glide) | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Upfront cost | €75k – €120k+ | €10k – €30k (impl.) | €2k – €5k |
| Annual running cost | €11k – €22k | ~€23k / yr | ~€2k / yr |
| 5-year TCO | €131k – €232k | €126k – €146k | €12k – €15k |
| Fits your exact workflow | ✓ Yes | ✗ Adapt to platform | ✓ Yes |
| Time to deploy | 3–6 months | 2–4 months | 2–6 weeks |
| Per-user pricing | No | Yes, €160+/user/month | No, unlimited users |
| Easy to modify post-launch | No, developer required | Partial, admin/consultant | Yes, in days |
| Suitable for SME (5–20 engineers) | Rarely | Technically yes, but costly | Ideal |
The Real Choice for Most Field Service SMEs
Look at the 5-year total cost of ownership numbers honestly: custom development will cost between €130,000 and €230,000 over five years. Salesforce Field Service, for a team of just eleven users, costs €125,000–€146,000 over the same period, and at the end of year five, you still own nothing and have no leverage over your per-user price. A low-code Glide application costs €12,000–€15,000 over five years, delivers the same core feature set, is fully tailored to your workflow, and can be modified in days rather than months.
The conclusion for an SME operating five to twenty field engineers is not close. Salesforce Field Service and fully custom development are both technically capable of solving the problem. But neither is commercially appropriate for a business of this size. The cost-to-value ratio is simply not there.
Where Salesforce does make sense: If your business has 50+ field engineers, complex multi-region scheduling, deep integration requirements across an existing Salesforce CRM and ERP, and a dedicated IT team to manage the platform, Salesforce Field Service is a legitimate choice. For everyone else, the overhead is disproportionate to the problem.
Why Data Sensum Recommends Low-Code for Field Service SMEs
We work with logistics, trades, and field service businesses across Ireland, and we are asked regularly whether a full enterprise platform might offer something a low-code app cannot. Our honest answer, for a business with five to thirty engineers, is almost never, for the same reasons the cost comparison above makes clear.
A Glide field service app can be live in two to six weeks. It works on any Android or iOS device an engineer already carries. It does exactly what your business does, not what an enterprise platform assumes businesses do. It does not cost more as your team grows. And when you need to add a new job type, a new report, or an integration with your invoicing system, that change costs days of work, not a Salesforce consultant's day rate.
We also see the practical reality of Salesforce implementations that have not gone well: months of configuration work, staff reluctance to use a complex interface, ongoing admin overhead that falls on whoever in the office knows the system best, and a dawning realisation that the platform was sized for a much bigger organisation. Low-code apps avoid all of that, because they are sized for the business that is actually using them.
If you are currently managing your field operations with paper job cards, WhatsApp messages to engineers, and a shared spreadsheet on the office screen, we can almost certainly build you a working Glide app that solves the problem, and have it in front of your team within a few weeks, at a cost that makes straightforward commercial sense.