Published May 2026 · Updated September 2026
Sequence your daily stops in the fastest order, see where your scheduled work actually clusters before you load the truck, and re-sequence automatically when a new appointment lands mid-day. Route Optimization and Route Density are included on QuoteIQ Elite at $299/month and Max at $699/month. Rated 4.7 stars across 4,103 reviews.
QuoteIQ is field service software with route optimization built in, aimed at home service contractors who want to compress drive time and fit more billable stops into the same working day. It pairs Route Optimization, which sequences a day’s stops for minimum drive time, with Route Density, which shows where your scheduled work clusters geographically so you can plan the day’s zone before you sequence anything. Route Optimization cuts drive time by 15–30%. Both features are included on Elite at $299/month with 10 users and Max at $699/month with unlimited users — no per-user routing fee and no bolt-on routing subscription. Jobber and Housecall Pro both ship routing features of their own on paid tiers, and ServiceTitan publishes no rate card at all, so its true cost only comes out of a sales call. Because the IRS values business driving at 72.5 cents per mile in 2026 — a figure built from an annual study of real fuel, maintenance, insurance and depreciation costs — every mile a router removes is money that stays in the business.
TL;DR: QuoteIQ runs routing as two layers. Route Density shows where work clusters so you pick the zone; Route Optimization then sequences the stops inside it, trimming drive time 15–30%. Both sit in the same calendar as your work, alongside EmployeeHub GPS, ClientHub on-the-way texts, InstaSchedule self-booking and Job Costing. Routing unlocks on Elite ($299) and Max ($699). Fuel is a genuinely controllable cost: the EIA publishes pump prices weekly, and the BLS tracks the trades doing the driving.
Windshield time is the one cost centre in a service business that produces nothing. Nobody bills for it, no customer values it, and it scales linearly with every truck you add. Yet most contractors have never actually costed it. The cleanest way to put a number on a mile is the federal one: the IRS sets an optional standard mileage rate each year, derived from an annual study of the fixed and variable costs of operating a vehicle — fuel, maintenance, tyres, insurance and depreciation rolled into one figure. For 2026 that rate is 72.5 cents per business mile. That is the number to hold in your head when you look at a route: every avoidable mile costs roughly three quarters of a dollar before anyone has turned a wrench.
Layer labour on top and the arithmetic gets uncomfortable. A technician sitting in traffic is being paid at their fully loaded rate, and that hour is also an hour that could have held a billable stop. So each wasted hour costs twice: once in wages paid, once in revenue not earned. Fuel is the third line, and it is genuinely volatile rather than fixed — the U.S. Energy Information Administration publishes national and regional pump prices every Monday, and a swing of fifty cents a gallon across a fleet is a real hit to the month. Rather than quote a national average that will be stale by the time you read it, plug your own current price into the worked example further down this page, or run the numbers against your own ticket sizes in the QuoteIQ business calculators.
The way most crews route is the problem. The dispatcher prints the day’s schedule, eyeballs the addresses, drops them into a mapping tab one at a time, and hands the technician a stack of work orders in roughly sensible order. The technician then re-routes from the truck because a one-way street was missed or a customer cancelled. By mid-afternoon the route looks nothing like the plan. Multiply that by five trucks and five weekdays and the drift compounds. Worse, the route lives in a mapping app while the job lives in the CRM, so nothing that happens on the road ever finds its way back into Job Costing or your analytics.
The second silent cost is dispatcher attention. Every minute spent building routes by hand is a minute not spent answering an inbound call, qualifying a lead, or heading off a customer escalation. The morning dispatch window is also the busiest inbound call window, and in most small operations it is the same person doing both. That is a staffing problem you can solve by hiring, or an operations problem you can solve by deleting the manual routing work altogether. Pairing automated routing with Virtual Call Team on the phone side attacks both ends of the same hour. Demand is not the constraint for most trades — the Bureau of Labor Statistics tracks steady employment in installation, maintenance and repair occupations, with roughly 440,900 HVAC mechanics and installers employed nationally. Capacity is the constraint. Routing is a capacity lever.
Cost the miles, not the feeling. At the 2026 IRS business rate of 72.5 cents per mile, a truck carrying 20 avoidable miles a day burns about $14.50 in vehicle cost alone — before labour, before the missed stop. Across four trucks and 250 working days that is roughly $14,500 a year in pure vehicle expense that produced no revenue. That figure is arithmetic on a published federal rate, not an estimate: multiply your own avoidable mileage by the current rate and you have your number.
QuoteIQ’s Route Optimization reads every job on the day’s calendar, accounts for appointment time windows and expected job duration, factors in where the technician starts, and produces the stop order that minimises total drive time. The dispatcher does not pick the sequence; the engine does. The result appears on the technician’s phone before they leave the yard, with GPS navigation, customer details and the next stop already queued. On QuoteIQ’s own feature documentation the effect is stated conservatively: Route Optimization cuts drive time by 15–30%. That is the honest range, and it is the number worth planning against rather than a headline figure pulled from a vendor case study.
The engine is built for the messy reality of a service day rather than a tidy planning exercise. An emergency call lands at 11am and the route recalculates from the truck’s current position. A customer cancels and the gap closes as the remaining stops collapse forward. A technician finishes twenty minutes early and the next customer’s on-the-way text fires earlier because the ETA moved. None of that needs dispatcher intervention — the engine reads the state of the calendar and recomputes. For trades running promised arrival windows, that difference between the plan and the day is exactly where reputations are won or lost: HVAC no-cool calls in July, plumbing emergency stops, and residential electrical service work all live in that gap.
Routing runs across day, week and employee-timeline views, so a dispatcher can see each technician’s sequenced day side by side rather than tab-hopping between individual schedules. Multi-day jobs, common in roofing and remodelling, render as continuous events across the timeline, so the engine does not try to slot an intermediate stop into a window that is already committed. Drag-and-drop reschedules feed straight back in. Recurring work — a weekly lawn care rotation, a quarterly pest control cycle — carries forward so neighbouring properties stay batched on the same service day instead of drifting apart over the season.
Because routing sits inside the platform rather than beside it, the field side comes with it. EmployeeHub puts the sequenced day on the technician’s phone; GPS location tracking shows the live team map while crews are clocked in and stops showing them the moment they clock out; Time Tracker Pro captures GPS clock-in and clock-out per job so the hours behind the route are real rather than remembered; and Team Communication keeps the day’s changes in one thread instead of a group text. Those all sit on the same Elite tier as routing, which is deliberate — a sequenced route with no way to see or time the crew running it is half a system.
What actually changes for the dispatcher: the morning stops being a routing exercise. Instead of building each truck’s day by hand in a mapping tab, the dispatcher checks the density view, confirms the zone, and lets the engine order the stops. The hour that frees up goes back into answering the phone and following up quotes in Pipelines & Deals — which is usually worth more than the fuel saving.
Availability, stated plainly: Route Optimization is included on Elite ($299/month, 10 users) and Max ($699/month, unlimited users). It is not available on Essentials, Beginner or Pro. Annual billing on either plan charges ten months for twelve, so Elite works out at $2,990 a year and Max at $6,990.
Route Density answers a question sequencing cannot: where should we be working today? The calendar’s map view shows where your scheduled jobs cluster geographically, so you can see at a glance that Tuesday holds six stops on the south side and one straggler out east. Once you can see that, you can act on it — move the straggler to a day when the east side is busy, or route a different technician through it. Density is a planning tool, and it operates before the optimiser ever runs.
The distinction matters because the two tools solve different problems and the gains stack. Optimisation answers “what order should we hit these eight stops?” Density answers “why are these eight stops on the same day in the first place?” Sequencing a badly composed day well still produces a bad day. For high-frequency recurring trades the composition question is the bigger lever, because the route repeats every week or every quarter: whatever inefficiency you bake into the schedule, you pay for it again on every cycle. That is why lawn care, pest control, pool service, residential cleaning and soft washing get more out of density than out of the optimiser.
Here is how that plays out in practice. A pest control operation running a few hundred recurring accounts across a metro uses the density view to identify which suburbs its book actually sits in — not where the owner thinks it sits, but where the pins land. The calendar then gets sectioned so each weekday belongs to a zone. New customers booking through InstaSchedule land on the day that matches their area, because the availability you expose is the availability you shaped. The dispatcher stops thinking about routing at all: the zone defines the calendar, the calendar defines what a customer can book, and the booking creates a stop that Route Optimization sequences. That is the whole loop, and it runs without anyone opening a map.
Density also changes how you sell. Once you know which zones are dense, you know where an extra customer is nearly free to serve and where one costs you forty minutes of driving. That is a marketing input, not just an operations one — it tells you which postcodes to push campaigns into and which to price differently. Feed the resulting jobs into Job Costing and you can see the margin difference between a dense-zone customer and a scattered one, rather than assuming every account at the same ticket earns the same money.
Density vs. Optimization, in one line: Route Density tells you which zone you are working today. Route Optimization tells you what order to hit the stops once you are there. Density is the weekly or seasonal decision; optimisation is the daily one. Both are included together on Elite and Max.
Where the two-layer approach earns its keep: recurring-service books. If the same 200 accounts get visited every week, a schedule composed by zone rather than by signup date is the single largest drive-time decision you will make all year — and it is one you make once, then benefit from on every cycle.
A standalone routing app — the kind you bolt onto another platform through an integration layer — saves drive time but creates a second source of truth. The route lives in one system, the schedule in another, and the two drift apart the moment anything changes. Somebody then has to reconcile them, which is exactly the manual work you bought software to remove. QuoteIQ’s routing is native rather than bolted on: the calendar that holds the job is the calendar the optimiser reads. There is no sync delay, no refresh-to-update, and no risk of the technician’s phone showing a different route than the one the office built. The customer record, the estimate, the invoice, the GPS clock-in and the route all share one database.
Concretely, here is the chain. AI Estimator turns property photos into a line-item quote with the address attached. MapMeasure Pro sizes the property from satellite imagery so the scope is right before anyone drives out. The customer approves and books their own slot through InstaSchedule, or self-quotes through InstaQuote. Route Density places the new stop in a zone; Route Optimization slots it into the day’s sequence. EmployeeHub serves the technician their next stop with navigation, and ClientHub sends the on-the-way text. Afterwards the customer pays through online payments — card, ACH bank transfer, Apple Pay or Google Pay, with cash and cheque recorded in the app — Job Costing updates with the real clocked hours, and Review Multiplier asks for the review. Every step is the same dataset.
That integration is what makes routing measurable rather than merely satisfying. When the route, the timesheet and the invoice all live together, you can actually answer whether a tighter route made you money. Time Tracker Pro supplies clocked hours per job, Expense Tracking attaches fuel and materials to the right job, and Business Analytics shows completion rate and job duration across the fleet. For contractors syncing their books, the QuickBooks Online integration carries invoices, payments, customers and expense categories through on Pro and above. A bolted-on router gives you a faster day and no evidence; a native one gives you both.
One point of clarity worth stating, because plenty of software marketing blurs it: QuoteIQ does not sell a separate “dispatching” module. What exists is scheduling and job assignment. You assign a scheduled visit to an individual team member from Pro upward, and crew-level assignment and crew scheduling arrive on Max through Crews. Routing sits on top of that assignment layer rather than replacing it. If you are comparing platforms and a rival feature matrix lists a separately-named dispatching module, check what it actually does before you weigh it — in most cases it is the same calendar-plus-assignment capability under a more impressive name.
No standalone routing subscription required. Contractors who bolt a dedicated routing product onto a platform that lacks one pay a second monthly bill, usually priced per vehicle, and then live with the sync gap between the two systems. Routing pricing across those vendors varies enough that it is worth checking their current rate cards directly rather than trusting a comparison table. QuoteIQ Elite at $299/month includes routing, density, GPS tracking and time tracking in the one subscription.
Most platforms describe “route optimization” as a single feature. In QuoteIQ it is a set of capabilities that only work because they share a calendar. The full set:
The optimiser reads every job on the day’s calendar, accounts for appointment windows, job duration and technician start location, and produces the fastest sequence — cutting drive time 15–30%.
Route Density shows where scheduled jobs cluster on the map, so you plan service days around real geographic batches instead of signup order.
A new emergency call, a cancellation or a job that runs long triggers a fresh calculation. The technician’s next stop updates in EmployeeHub without dispatcher action.
Technicians get the route, the customer address and GPS navigation inside the QuoteIQ mobile app on iOS, Android or web — no copy-pasting addresses between apps.
As the day shifts, ClientHub sends on-the-way messages from your dedicated business number, so customers hear from you before they call asking where the truck is.
What follows is arithmetic on stated assumptions, not a performance claim. Substitute your own figures — that is the point of showing the working. Setup: four trucks, each running seven stops a day, 250 working days a year. Assume each truck currently carries 20 avoidable miles and 45 avoidable minutes a day because the day was routed by hand. Value the miles at the 2026 IRS business rate of 72.5 cents, which already bundles fuel, maintenance, insurance and depreciation. Value the time at whatever your fully loaded labour rate is; the table below leaves that as your input rather than inventing one.
That $14,500 is only the vehicle line. It excludes the wages paid for the driving and the revenue from stops that did not fit. If Route Optimization delivers at the documented 15–30% drive-time reduction, the recovered portion of those miles and minutes is the return. On the cost side, the comparison is straightforward because QuoteIQ publishes its rate card and includes routing rather than metering it.
Set the two against each other and the shape of the decision is clear enough without any inflated claims: the annual Elite subscription is in the same order of magnitude as the vehicle cost of the avoidable miles alone, before labour and before capacity. Whether it pays depends on how much avoidable driving you are actually doing — which is why the honest first step is measuring it. Run one week routed as you do now, then one week routed by the engine, and compare. That is a real experiment you can run inside a 14-day trial, and it beats any vendor’s ROI table including this one. If you want to sanity-check your ticket sizes and hourly rate first, the home service business calculators and the trade-specific tools — the lawn care cost calculator, the pressure washing cost calculator, the HVAC cost calculator and the pest control cost calculator — are free and need no account.
Measure it, don’t model it. The strongest case for routing software is your own before-and-after, not a spreadsheet. Log one normal week’s odometer readings and finish times, switch the routing on, and log the next week. Both weeks fit comfortably inside a 14-day trial.
Route Optimization and Route Density are gated to Elite and Max because they are operationally meaningful for teams running several trucks a day — the scale where Elite’s 10 users and Max’s unlimited seats are the right fit. A solo operator on Essentials running six or eight stops in a familiar patch gets little from algorithmic sequencing. Below is exactly what each plan includes around scheduling, field visibility and routing.
| Scheduling & Routing Feature | Essentials $29.99 | Beginner $74.99 | Pro $149.99 | Elite $299 | Max $699 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Drag-and-drop calendar | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Automated appointment reminders | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Multi-day & recurring jobs | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| GEO-Schedule map calendar view | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| MapMeasure Pro satellite measurement | — | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Assign a visit to an individual | — | — | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| On-the-way texts (ClientHub) | — | — | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| EmployeeHub GPS location tracking | — | — | — | ✓ | ✓ |
| Time Tracker Pro (GPS clock in/out) | — | — | — | ✓ | ✓ |
| InstaSchedule (customer self-booking) | — | — | — | ✓ | ✓ |
| Route Optimization | — | — | — | ✓ | ✓ |
| Route Density | — | — | — | ✓ | ✓ |
| Crew creation, tracking & scheduling | — | — | — | — | ✓ |
| Sales Team Tracker | — | — | — | — | ✓ |
| Users included | 1 user | 2 users | 4 users | 10 users | Unlimited |
| IQ Credits per month | 500 | 1,500 | 3,000 | 5,000 | 8,000 |
Running one to three trucks? Pro at $149.99/month is usually the right fit — you get ClientHub, Job Costing, the Client Portal and QuickBooks Online sync, and sequencing adds little at small stop counts. Running four or more trucks? Elite is where routing, GPS and self-booking arrive together.
Routing is not equally valuable across every trade, and it is worth being honest about that before you buy on the strength of it. High-stop-count recurring service trades gain most from the density layer, because the routing problem is daily, dense and repeating. Emergency-heavy trades gain most from recalculation, because the schedule changes under them all day. Long-job, low-stop-count trades gain least. Six plays where the case is strongest:
Assign every account a fixed weekly service day by zone rather than by signup date, then let the optimiser order each day. Pair with lawn care CRM and price jobs with the lawn care cost calculator. Highest-leverage trade for the density layer.
Quarterly treatment schedules organised by density eliminate the single-house-in-a-postcode runs that quietly destroy margin. Use with pest control CRM and the pest control cost calculator. Set the zone once, benefit every cycle.
A summer day holds scheduled maintenance plus no-cool calls landing hourly. The route recalculates from the truck’s position each time the calendar moves. Pair with HVAC software and the HVAC cost calculator. Recalculation matters more than sequencing here.
Plumbing days rarely survive contact with the morning. Recalculation plus ClientHub on-the-way texts keeps customers informed without phone tag. Use with plumbing software. Fewer “where is he?” calls to field.
Pool routes are close to a pure density problem: a cluster of customers in one subdivision visited the same day weekly. Density locks the assignment, optimisation orders the day. Pair with pool service software. Short stops, so drive time dominates the day.
Residential washing batches well by neighbourhood in season. Density plus InstaSchedule books new customers into the zone day that already exists. Pair with soft washing or pressure washing software. Self-booking does the zoning for you.
Where routing matters least: trades running one or two long jobs a day. Roofing, remodelling and concrete crews spend their day on site, not between sites. For those trades the bigger software wins are usually AI Estimator, MapMeasure Pro and consumer financing — and Pro may serve them better than Elite.
Every figure below was read off each vendor’s own public pricing page on 5 September 2026. Where a vendor does not publish a number, this table says so rather than repeating a figure from a review site — aggregator pricing for this category goes stale fast, and several widely-cited numbers for these platforms are already wrong. Compare the full feature set on the QuoteIQ comparison hub, and check each vendor’s page yourself before you sign anything.
| Routing capability | QuoteIQ | Jobber | Housecall Pro | ServiceTitan |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Publishes a public rate card | Yes | Yes | Yes | No — sales call required |
| Plan where routing is included | Elite $299/mo (10 users) | Included on paid plans — see their plan comparison for the tier | Route optimization on Max $299/mo annual (8 users) | Contact for pricing |
| Basic route sequencing available lower down | Elite and above only | Routing plus “Find a Time” travel-aware scheduling | “Routes” on Essentials $149/mo annual | Contact for pricing |
| Geographic density planning layer | ✓ Route Density | Not listed on their pricing page | Not listed on their pricing page | Not published |
| Entry price for the platform | $29.99/mo Essentials | $49/mo Core, 1 user | $59/mo Basic annual, 1 user | Contact for pricing |
| Users included at the routing tier | 10 on Elite | 1–15 depending on plan variant | 8 on Max | Per-technician licensing |
| Cost of an extra user | $0 within the 10 included; unlimited on Max | $29/mo each | $75/mo each on Max; $100/mo on Essentials | Contact for pricing |
| GPS technician tracking | ✓ EmployeeHub, Elite+ | ✓ in-app, plus fleet partners | ✓ Employee GPS on Essentials+ | Not published |
| On-the-way customer notifications | ✓ ClientHub, Pro+ | ✓ | ✓ | Not published |
| Customer self-booking | ✓ InstaSchedule, Elite+ | ✓ online booking | ✓ online booking, all plans | Not published |
| Free trial | ✓ 14 days on the plan you choose | ✓ 14 days on the Grow plan | ✓ 14 days on the Max plan | No free trial advertised |
Sources, all checked 5 September 2026: getjobber.com/pricing (page last modified 13 August 2026) and housecallpro.com/pricing (last modified 26 August 2026). ServiceTitan publishes no rate card; its pricing page directs buyers to contact sales, so no dollar figure for it appears in this table. Prices shown are the vendors’ own list rates and may differ after negotiation, by region, or on a longer commitment.
A note on fairness: Jobber and Housecall Pro both ship real routing. Housecall Pro puts basic route grouping on its middle tier and one-click optimisation on Max; Jobber lists routing plus travel-aware scheduling among its job-tracking features. Older comparison articles claiming either platform “has no route optimization” are out of date — we checked both vendors’ pages directly rather than repeat them. QuoteIQ’s distinct piece is the density planning layer and the seat count at the routing tier, not the existence of a router.
Every plan with its user count, IQ Credit allowance and where routing sits on the ladder. Annual billing charges ten months for twelve. Every plan includes a 14-day free trial giving full access to the features of the plan you choose, so if you want to test routing during the trial, start it on Elite or Max.
Annual billing: pay for ten months, get twelve — Elite works out at $2,990 a year and Max at $6,990. Month-to-month is available on every plan with no contract, cancellable from inside the account. Upgrading mid-cycle charges the prorated difference and your IQ Credits jump immediately. Full detail on the pricing page.
Ordering a day’s stops is a version of a genuinely hard computational problem. With eight stops there are already tens of thousands of possible orders; at a dozen the count runs into the hundreds of millions. No dispatcher evaluates those options — they apply a rule of thumb, usually “start with the furthest” or “go roughly clockwise,” and that heuristic is often decent but rarely optimal. A routing engine does not brute-force every permutation either; it searches intelligently for a strong solution within the constraints you have given it. The practical consequence is that the gain is real but bounded, which is exactly why Route Optimization is documented at a 15–30% drive-time reduction rather than something more dramatic.
Constraints are where the engine separates itself from a mapping app. A mapping app optimises a list of addresses with no notion that the 9am appointment cannot move, that the second job needs three hours, that one technician starts from home and another from the yard, or that a customer specifically asked for an afternoon slot. Those constraints are precisely what make real routing hard and what makes calendar-native routing better than address-list routing. Because the optimiser reads jobs rather than pins, it already knows the durations, the windows and the assignments from the calendar and, at Elite, the crew assignments from EmployeeHub.
This also explains the limit worth knowing before you buy. If your stops are already tightly clustered and your day is essentially fixed, an optimiser has little room to work — you are near the floor already, and the honest answer is that routing software will not transform your week. The larger, more reliable gain in that situation comes from the composition side: Route Density changing which jobs share a day at all. It is a common and expensive mistake to buy an optimiser to fix a scheduling problem. Sequencing a poorly composed day is a smaller lever than composing it better in the first place, and no engine can fix a calendar built in signup order.
One more piece of realism: traffic and job overruns mean the plan degrades through the day. That is not a flaw in the optimiser, it is the nature of the work. What matters is how quickly the system responds — whether the route recalculates from the truck’s actual position when something changes, and whether the customer hears about it automatically through ClientHub rather than by calling the office. Judge routing software on how it handles the day falling apart, not on how tidy the 7am plan looks.
The two-question buying test. First: how many stops does a truck make in a day? Under about five, sequencing gains are small. Second: is your schedule composed geographically or chronologically? If it is chronological — jobs land on whatever day the customer picked — the density layer is where your money is, and you should evaluate on that rather than on the optimiser.
The hardest part of adopting routing is not the software, it is the address data. An optimiser is only as good as the addresses it is given, and most contractor customer lists carry years of accumulated mess: missing unit numbers, two records for the same property, addresses typed into a notes field. Clean that first. QuoteIQ’s AI Smart Import handles CSV exports from other platforms with automatic column mapping, which gets the bulk in, but it is worth spending an afternoon on the records that fail to place on the map. Every bad address is a stop the engine cannot sequence and a truck that goes the wrong way.
Second, get the durations honest. If every job in your calendar is set to a default hour when half of them take twenty minutes and some take three, the optimiser is planning against fiction and the day will run late regardless of the sequence. A week of real clocked data from Time Tracker Pro will tell you what your jobs actually take, by job type. Feed that back into your default durations before you judge whether routing is working.
Third, bring the crew along. Technicians who have driven the same patch for years often know something the map does not — a gate that is locked before eight, a customer who is never home on Fridays, a road that backs up at school run. Ask before you switch, and record the constraints as appointment windows rather than letting them live in a technician’s head. A route the crew does not trust gets quietly ignored, and then you have paid for software and kept the old process. Use Team Communication for the changeover week so the questions land in one place.
Finally, sequence the rollout itself. Put one truck on automated routing first, keep the rest on the current process, and compare like for like. If it works, roll it out. Once it is running, let InstaSchedule shape the intake so new bookings land in the right zone from day one, and check the results in Business Analytics rather than by feel. Most of the value compounds after the first month, when the schedule has been recomposed around density rather than history.
Four-week rollout that works: week one, import and clean addresses. Week two, fix job durations using real clocked hours. Week three, one truck on automated routing, measured against the others. Week four, whole fleet, with intake zoned through self-booking. Nobody loses a day of production at any point.
For contractors running four or more trucks or thirty-plus stops a day, QuoteIQ Elite at $299 a month is a strong choice, because it bundles two routing layers plus the field tools that make routing usable, with ten users included and no per-seat charge inside that count. Route Optimization sequences the day for a documented 15–30% drive-time reduction, and Route Density shows where the work clusters so you can compose the day before you order it. Both sit in the same calendar as your jobs, alongside EmployeeHub GPS and ClientHub on-the-way texts. That said, “best” depends on shape: Jobber and Housecall Pro both ship capable routing and both publish their prices, while ServiceTitan publishes none. One to three trucks usually does better on Pro at $149.99, where routing is absent but the rest of the platform is not. Compare the field yourself on the comparison hub.
Bundled inside a field service platform, routing generally costs nothing extra beyond the tier it unlocks on — the real question is which tier that is and how many seats come with it. With QuoteIQ, routing arrives on Elite at $299 a month with 10 users or Max at $699 with unlimited users, and annual billing charges ten months for twelve, so $2,990 and $6,990 respectively. Checked on 5 September 2026, Housecall Pro’s published rate card puts route grouping on Essentials at $149 a month annually and one-click route optimisation on Max at $299 annually with eight users, charging $75 per additional user there. Jobber publishes a four-tier ladder starting at $49 and adds users at $29 each. ServiceTitan publishes no pricing at all. Standalone routing products add a second per-vehicle subscription on top of your platform, and leave you reconciling two systems — check their current rates directly. Inside QuoteIQ the routing tier also carries EmployeeHub GPS and InstaSchedule, so the comparison is rarely routing alone. Sanity-check the whole cost against your own numbers in the business calculators, and compare tiers on the pricing page.
In two layers: density planning that decides which recurring accounts share a service day, then daily sequencing that orders the stops inside it. A lawn care operation uses Route Density to assign each customer a fixed weekly day based on geographic cluster rather than signup date — Monday north side, Tuesday east side, and so on. New customers booking through InstaSchedule land on the day matching their area automatically, because the availability you expose is the availability you shaped. Route Optimization then sequences that day’s stops, accounting for job duration and crew start location. The same logic runs pest control on quarterly cycles: the zone decides which week an account is treated, the optimiser decides the order within it. Both trades are high-frequency and low-duration, so drive time is a large share of the day — which is why the BLS grounds-maintenance and pest-control occupation data describes work that is fundamentally route-shaped. Price the work with the lawn care cost calculator.
Route Optimization and Route Density are both included on Elite at $299 a month with 10 users, and on Max at $699 a month with unlimited users. They are not available on Essentials, Beginner or Pro. Essentials at $29.99, Beginner at $74.99 and Pro at $149.99 all include the drag-and-drop calendar, automated reminders, multi-day and recurring jobs and the GEO-Schedule map view, and Pro adds ClientHub with on-the-way texts plus Job Costing. The field-visibility tools that pair with routing — EmployeeHub GPS location tracking and Time Tracker Pro — arrive at Elite alongside it, and InstaSchedule self-booking does too. Crew creation, tracking and scheduling are Max only. The gating is deliberate rather than arbitrary: sequencing adds little below roughly four trucks or thirty daily stops, which is also the point where ten seats starts to matter. Full ladder on the pricing page. For context on the trades this tier serves, see the BLS occupational data.
All three ship real routing; they differ on which tier it lands on, how many seats come with it, and whether a geographic planning layer exists alongside the sequencer. Verified on each vendor’s own pricing page on 5 September 2026: Jobber lists routing among its job-tracking features together with travel-aware scheduling, across a ladder from $49 to $499 with users at $29 each. Housecall Pro puts route grouping on Essentials and one-click optimisation on Max at $299 annually with eight users. QuoteIQ Elite at the same $299 includes ten users plus Route Density as a planning layer above Route Optimization, along with InstaSchedule and EmployeeHub. Worth flagging: older comparison articles claiming Housecall Pro offers no automatic route optimisation are out of date — their own page now documents it on Max. Read the detail on the comparison hub and check each vendor directly.
Yes, provided you start the trial on a plan that includes it — the 14-day free trial gives full access to the features of the plan you choose, so select Elite or Max to test routing. Starting on Essentials or Pro gives you a full trial of those plans, which do not carry routing. Sign up at the registration page or review tiers on the pricing page first. A credit or debit card is required to start, one trial is available per person, business and payment method, and the trial converts to the plan’s normal rate unless you cancel before it expires — cancellation is available at any point during the trial. The most useful way to spend those two weeks is a direct comparison: import your customers with AI Smart Import, schedule a real week into the calendar, run Route Optimization against it, and measure odometer and finish times versus the week before. The Help Center covers setup, and support is available on every plan.
Multi-stop recurring service trades gain most, because the routing problem repeats every week or quarter and drive time is a large share of a short-job day. The strongest cases are lawn care, pest control, pool service, residential cleaning and soft washing — all of which benefit primarily from the density planning layer rather than the sequencer. Emergency-mixed trades like HVAC and plumbing benefit from a different property: recalculation as the day changes. HVAC is a large field — the BLS counts roughly 440,900 HVAC mechanics and installers employed — and those teams live or die on hitting promised windows. Trades gaining least are the long-job, low-stop-count ones: roofing and remodelling crews spend the day on one site, so AI Estimator and MapMeasure Pro usually beat routing for them. A quick self-test: count the stops one truck makes on a normal day and ask whether the schedule is built geographically or chronologically. Five or more stops composed by date rather than by area means routing has room to work; two long jobs booked into a fixed area means it does not.
QuoteIQ documents Route Optimization as cutting drive time by 15–30%, and that is the range worth planning against rather than a headline number. Converting it to money is arithmetic you can do yourself: the 2026 IRS business standard mileage rate is 72.5 cents per mile, built from an annual study of fuel, maintenance, insurance and depreciation, so twenty avoidable miles a day costs about $14.50 per truck in vehicle expense alone — roughly $14,500 a year across four trucks over 250 working days. Add the wages paid for that driving and the stops that did not fit and the real figure is higher. Fuel specifically moves week to week; the EIA publishes current pump prices every Monday. The savings come from three places: sequencing removing backtracking, density removing isolated stops, and recalculation absorbing mid-day changes. Track the result honestly with Time Tracker Pro, Job Costing and Business Analytics.
Two layers, not one. Density composes the day; Optimization orders it. Sequencing a badly composed day well is still a bad day.
Elite $299 or Max $699. Ten users on Elite, unlimited on Max, with no per-seat charge inside the count. Annual billing pays ten months for twelve.
15–30% drive time. That is the documented range, and it is bounded by physics and constraints. Treat larger claims from any vendor with suspicion.
Native beats bolted-on. One database means the route, the timesheet and the invoice agree without reconciliation.
Not every trade needs it. Under about five stops a day, or on long single-site jobs, Pro at $149.99 is the more sensible plan.
Measure, don’t model. Run one week your way and one week routed, inside the 14-day trial. Your own numbers beat anyone’s ROI table.
A 14-day free trial gives full access to the features of the plan you choose — start on Elite or Max to run Route Optimization and Route Density against your own week. GPS tracking, on-the-way texts and self-booking all live in the same calendar. Rated 4.7 stars across 4,103 reviews by 40,000+ contractors.
Watch how contractors run quoting, scheduling, routing and payments from one app.
Four steps from signup to a sequenced day. Most contractors are routing within half an hour.
Register at admin-quoteiq.web.app/register. The 14-day trial gives full access to the features of the plan you pick, so choose Elite or Max if you want routing included.
Upload your customer CSV or use AI Smart Import for automatic column mapping. Fix any addresses that fail to place on the map — bad addresses are the main cause of bad routes.
Open the calendar map view to see where scheduled jobs cluster. Filter by zone and decide which days serve which areas before you sequence anything.
From the day or week view, run Optimize. The engine sequences the stops for minimum drive time and technicians see the route in EmployeeHub with GPS navigation.
“I have a lawncare business, was unorganized, but QuoteIQ changed everything. Estimates, scheduling, billing and invoicing are seamless. Tax prep easier. Best CRM by functionality and price.”
“From quote generation to follow-ups, this CRM simplifies my pest control workday. Organized, efficient, and makes me look super professional every time.”
“I’m on my second year of business and have been using QuoteIQ for 4 months. It has been great for me. It reduces the time required by me to manage customer information, quoting, scheduling, and invoicing. It streamlined a lot of my processes to help grow my business.”
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