What Should an 18-Person Landscaping Company Actually Pay for Software?

Here's the breakdown, pillar by pillar, for an 18-person landscaping company doing both maintenance routes and design/build projects.

Sales & Marketing: $1,000-1,200/mo

Lead generation usually splits between local marketplace ads and social, and the two compete for the same job — this is a real category collision, not two complementary tools. Angi Leads runs around $500/mo and pulls homeowners actively searching for lawn care and hardscape work; Meta Ads runs around $400/mo and works better for showcasing design/build project photos to a colder audience. The common mistake is running both indefinitely instead of testing one against the other with CallRail attribution and cutting the loser — that's a full lead-gen budget spent proving what one quarter of tracked data would have shown for free. CallRail is $150/mo for call tracking and attribution. Podium is $250/mo for review generation and webchat conversion. Mailchimp adds $65/mo for seasonal promotion campaigns and maintenance-plan renewals.

Core Operations: $850-1,100/mo

This is where team size changes the answer most. Aspire runs $550/mo and is built for 10-200 employees with deep job costing and multi-division scheduling; the failure mode is a maintenance-only crew paying for division-level reporting it will never configure. SingleOps is $400/mo for 5-150 employees, covering CRM, proposals, and scheduling without Aspire's manufacturing-depth overhead. LMN is $300/mo and focuses heavily on budgeting and crew time-tracking for 5-100 employees but doesn't include a built-in CRM, so a company that picks LMN purely on price sometimes ends up bolting on a separate CRM anyway, erasing the savings. Most 18-person mixed operations land on Aspire or SingleOps. Add Samsara at $220/mo for fleet GPS and CompanyCam at $150/mo for job-site photo documentation.

Finance: $400/mo

QuickBooks Online is $90/mo for general ledger and invoicing. Gusto is $200/mo for payroll on hourly seasonal laborers and salaried office staff. Ramp is $0/mo for corporate-card expense tracking on fuel and material runs. Bill.com is $99/mo for automating nursery and subcontractor payments.

Admin & Security: $430/mo

Google Workspace Business Standard is $170/mo for email and shared calendars. 1Password Business is $95/mo for vaults shared across crew leads and office staff. DocuSign is $80/mo for design/build contracts and seasonal maintenance agreements. Huntress Managed EDR is $85/mo for endpoint security on office PCs and crew-lead tablets.

What this adds up to

A genuinely optimized stack for an 18-person landscaping company lands in the $2,700-3,100/mo range — but we regularly see companies paying $5,000-7,200/mo because they're running an enterprise ERP sized for a much bigger operation, paying for two scheduling tools, or never renegotiated after their crew size changed.

Run the free audit with your actual headcount and current spend to see exactly where your landscaping stack stands.