What Canadian Contractors Actually Spend on Software Per Month

In our worked example, a one-person Canadian trades business running five software subscriptions pays $141.83 CAD a month before sales tax, and typical stacks land roughly between $90 and $180. A two-to-five person crew on per-seat pricing lands between $200 and $400. The spread is wide because almost nobody pays the price on the pricing page: four of those five subscriptions are billed in US dollars, your card adds a foreign-transaction fee on top of the conversion, and some of the sales tax on them may not be claimable. Below is the line-by-line math, and then the same workload priced as a single Canadian-dollar plan, including an honest list of what that plan does not cover.

Key takeaways

• In our worked example, five subscriptions priced in US dollars cost $141.83 CAD a month ($1,701.96 a year) before sales tax, because of the exchange rate and your card's foreign-transaction fee.

• If you are a GST/HST registrant and have never given your software vendors your GST/HST number, you may be paying tax you cannot claim back: roughly $83 to $249 a year on this stack, depending on your province. Confirm with your accountant.

• In BC, a separate 7% PST can apply to software, and PST is not claimable as an input tax credit whichever vendor you buy from.

• Add two more people to the scheduling and invoicing tools and the same stack costs $237.32 a month, because most of these tools charge per seat.

• One Canadian-dollar plan at $49.99 a month covers quoting, invoicing, checkouts, jobs and up to five users, but it does not replace your accountant, your payroll or any trade-specific software.

The five-app stack, line by line

Here is a stack we see frequently: a quoting or estimating tool, a separate invoicing tool, a scheduling and dispatch tool, a payment link tool, and a receipt capture app. The prices below are representative of what entry and mid tiers go for in this category. They are illustrative, not quotes from any vendor, and software pricing moves, so pull your own numbers off your last statement before you decide anything. What matters is the shape of the math.

We are converting at 1.37 CAD per USD and adding a 2.5% foreign-transaction fee, which is the example rate we use throughout this post. Swap in the rate your own card actually charged you last month.

• Quote and estimate builder: US$19/mo, billed in USD, $26.68 on your card

• Invoicing: US$25/mo, billed in USD, $35.11 on your card

• Scheduling and dispatch: US$49/mo, billed in USD, $68.81 on your card

• Payment links and checkout: $0/mo plus per-transaction fees, billed in USD, $0 subscription

• Receipt and expense capture: US$8/mo, billed in USD, $11.23 on your card

• Total: US$101/mo, which is $141.83/mo on your card

That is $1,701.96 a year, before sales tax. The USD list prices add up to US$101, which sounds like a hundred bucks, and the gap between "sounds like a hundred bucks" and $1,702 CAD is the whole point of this article.

Here is where the extra $40.83 a month comes from. Most of it is the exchange rate, and a smaller slice is your card's fee on top. We use an example rate of 1.37 CAD per USD and a 2.5% card fee.

• Listed price: US$101.00 a month

• Exchange rate at 1.37 CAD per USD: adds $37.37

• Card foreign-transaction fee at 2.5%: adds $3.46

• What leaves your account: $141.83 a month

The foreign-transaction fee nobody puts in the comparison

Almost every software comparison quotes USD list prices and stops there. But the rate your card uses is not the mid-market rate you see on Google. Many Canadian credit cards add a foreign-transaction fee on top of the exchange rate, and 2.5% is a common figure. We use 2.5% in every example here so the numbers are easy to follow, but your card may charge more, less or nothing at all. The rate is printed in your cardholder agreement, and the Financial Consumer Agency of Canada shows where it appears in a card's information box.

On the example stack, that 2.5% is $3.46 a month, or $41.52 a year. Not catastrophic on its own, but it is money leaving for nothing, and you pay it four separate times because it applies to each charge, not to the total.

Switching one of those tools to annual billing does not help as much as you would hope. The 2.5% applies to the whole annual charge in one hit, so you save on the subscription discount, not on the foreign-transaction fee.

A few Canadian business cards waive the fee. If most of your software spend is in US dollars, that card is worth ten minutes of research.

Sales tax on US software: what you can claim back and what you can't

Non-resident companies that sell digital products to Canadians generally have to register with the CRA and collect GST/HST under a simplified system, as CRA Notice 322 explains. Many of the US tools in your stack are set up this way.

Here is the catch. Tax collected by a vendor on the simplified system generally cannot be claimed as an input tax credit. The same CRA notice says a vendor is not required to collect it when you are registered under the normal GST/HST rules and give them your registration number at the time of the sale. If you were charged anyway, a registrant can ask the vendor for a refund or credit, and needs to show that their registration was in effect when the sale was made.

How much this costs you depends on where you are. Here is one month of sales tax on the converted price ($138.37) of the example stack in four provincial setups:

• Alberta (5% GST): $6.92 a month, $83.02 a year. The GST is claimable if you are registered and give vendors your number.

• Ontario (13% HST): $17.99 a month, $215.86 a year. The HST is claimable if you are registered and give vendors your number.

• New Brunswick, Newfoundland and Labrador, Nova Scotia and PEI (15% HST): $20.76 a month, $249.07 a year. The HST is claimable if you are registered and give vendors your number.

• British Columbia (5% GST + 7% PST): $16.60 a month, $199.25 a year. That is $6.92 of GST, which is claimable if you are registered and give vendors your number, plus $9.69 of PST, which is never claimable.

Figures are calculated on the $138.37 converted price and rounded, so a total can differ from its parts by a cent.

Over a year, that works out to about $83 at 5% GST, about $216 at 13% HST and about $249 at 15% HST. In BC the GST part is the same $83, and the PST adds about $116 a year on top. BC does not give businesses a PST input tax credit, so the province treats PST as a cost you absorb whichever vendor you buy from. BC's Ministry of Finance also considers software as a service to be taxable software, so it can apply to US subscriptions too.

Quebec, Saskatchewan and Manitoba also have their own provincial taxes, and the rules for software differ, so we have not charted them. Ask your accountant how they apply to you.

Here is what to do about it:

1. Check each vendor against CRA's simplified GST/HST registry. A vendor that is not on it is registered under the normal rules, and the tax it charges is claimable in the usual way.

2. For vendors on the registry, log into the billing settings and enter your GST/HST number. If you are registered under the normal rules, the vendor is not required to charge you the tax once it has your number.

3. If you were already charged while registered, ask the vendor for a refund or credit and show that your registration was in effect on the sale date.

4. Keep the invoices. Your bookkeeper can confirm which regime a vendor is on, and which tax is claimable.

We are software co-founders, not accountants, so confirm all of this against your own situation before you change anything.

Where crews get hit: per-seat pricing

The table above is one user. Add a second tech and a dispatcher and the numbers move fast, because scheduling and dispatch tools in this category almost always charge per seat.

Take the same stack and add two users to the scheduling tool at US$29 each and one extra user to the invoicing tool at US$10. You have gone from US$101 to US$169 a month. In Canadian dollars after conversion and the card fee, that is $237.32 a month, or $2,847.84 a year before sales tax, for three people using software that still does not talk to itself.

And that is the second hidden cost. When your quoting tool and your scheduling tool are different products, somebody retypes the job address, the scope and the line items. Twenty minutes per job, four jobs a week, is about 69 hours a year. At $65 an hour billed out, that is about $4,500 of time spent copying things between tabs, on top of the software bill.

Payment processing is a line item, not a free tool

The payment link tool in the table shows $0 for the subscription, which is technically true and practically misleading. Processing is usually your largest software-adjacent cost. It is just charged as a percentage instead of a monthly fee.

Say you run $12,000 a month in card payments across 60 transactions. At 2.9% + $0.30 that is $348 in percentage fees plus $18 in per-transaction fees, so $366. At 2.79% + $0.15 it is $334.80 plus $9, so $343.80. The difference is $22.20 a month, or $266.40 a year, on identical volume.

Chronly's card rates are 2.9% + $0.30 on the Free plan and 2.79% + $0.15 on Seller and Pro, with no Chronly markup on top. At the time of writing (October 2026), Square lists 2.9% + 30¢ for online and invoice payments in Canada, and Stripe lists the same standard rate on its Canadian pricing page. That means our Free plan matches them, and Seller and Pro come in lower. Moneris sets pricing based on your business, so compare it against your own statement.

There is one more fee, and we would rather you see it here than discover it later: payouts cost $0.40 per batch, not per transaction. If money lands every business day, that is roughly $8 a month. Finix is the processor, payouts run daily when funds are waiting, and they land in 1 to 3 business days. You can see the exact fee breakdown on every individual transaction inside integrated payments, and there is no contract on processing, so you can stop whenever you want. Finix reviews and approves merchant accounts, and that decision and its timing sit with them, not with us.

If a chunk of your volume is deposits taken at quote acceptance, we worked through the math on that in what collecting a deposit in Canada actually costs.

The same workload on one Canadian-dollar plan

Chronly's Pro plan is $49.99 CAD a month, or $509.90 a year on annual billing, which works out to $42.49 a month. It is billed in Canadian dollars by a BC company, so there is no conversion and no foreign-transaction fee. The GST/HST on it is ordinary Canadian tax that registrants generally claim as an input tax credit in the normal way. If you are in BC, PST may also apply to a software subscription, and as with any software it cannot be claimed back.

Pro covers quoting, invoicing, checkouts, products, customers, forms, scheduling and jobs, with up to 5 users included rather than priced per seat. The jobs piece is the part that removes the retyping: an accepted quote converts to an invoice or a job in one click, and the job then holds the linked quotes and invoices, the files and photos, the scheduled visits, the crew and the full activity log in one record. There is a public share link customers can open without a login, and they can upload files back to it. Receipt uploads are unlimited on Pro, and receipts forwarded to your Chronly inbox address do not count against any cap.

Against the single-user example stack, that is $141.83 down to $49.99, a difference of $91.84 a month or $1,102.08 a year before sales tax. Against the three-user version it is $237.32 down to $49.99, which is $2,247.96 a year. Add the processing-rate difference at $12,000 in monthly volume and you are over $2,500.

If you are a one-person operation who does not need scheduling or job management, the Free plan is $0 forever with no card required and covers quoting, invoicing, checkouts and payments at 2.9% + $0.30. Seller at $9.99 CAD adds recurring invoices, API access, webhooks, one auto-syncing bank connection and the better card rate. Every paid plan has a 30-day trial with no card up front. The full breakdown is on our pricing page.

What one plan honestly does not replace

We would rather you budget correctly than be annoyed in month two, so here is the list.

• Your accountant and your bookkeeper. Chronly feeds accounting software; it does not replace the people. Nothing here files a return, a GST/HST remittance or a T2125 on your behalf. The bookkeeping and accounting module is in beta and currently free on every plan, and it produces GST/HST return figures, T2125 figures, P&L, balance sheet and reconciliation views for you or your accountant to use at filing time. It is reporting, not filing.

• Your accounting subscription, if your accountant insists on one. Chronly connects to and exports for Sage, Sage 50, QuickBooks and Wave. Sage 50 integration is on the Pro plan. If your bookkeeper will only work in QuickBooks, that subscription stays.

• Payroll. Whatever you use for payroll and source deductions stays where it is.

• Trade-specific takeoff or CAD software. If you do sheet metal layout or load calculations, that tool is not going anywhere.

• Email, file storage and your phone plan. Obvious, but people leave them out of stack comparisons and then the savings number does not match the bank statement.

A couple of specifics on timing, because overpromising here would be exactly the thing this article is complaining about: customer self-booking links, recurring calendar events and two-way Google or Outlook calendar sync are not live yet. If two-way calendar sync is load-bearing for how you run your week, know that going in.

How to audit your own stack in about twenty minutes

Do not estimate this from memory. Nobody remembers all of it.

1. Pull the last three months of statements for every card and account the business uses, including any personal card you have been meaning to stop using for this.

2. Highlight every recurring charge under $300. That is where software hides. Write down the CAD amount that actually hit the account, not the list price you think you are paying.

3. Flag anything with a foreign-transaction fee beside it. Those are your USD subscriptions, and the real cost is the converted amount plus the fee.

4. Open each vendor's billing page and check three things: whether your GST/HST number is entered, whether the vendor appears on CRA's simplified GST/HST registry, and whether you are on a plan tier you stopped needing a year ago.

5. List what each tool is genuinely the only one doing. Most stacks have at least one tool whose single remaining job is something another tool already does.

6. Multiply the monthly total by 12 before you decide anything. The annual number is the one that changes behaviour.

Then compare that annual number to what consolidating would cost, including the switching time, which is real. Give yourself a weekend to move customers and products over, and run both in parallel for one billing cycle if that makes you sleep better. We ran our own business on Chronly for all of 2025 before we launched it publicly in 2026, so we understand the "I need to see it work before I cancel anything" instinct.

If you want to walk through your specific stack with us, email [email protected] or start from our pricing page. We are a small team in Prince George, so you will be talking to the people who build it, which cuts both ways.

Sources

Tax rules, rates and vendor pricing change. Check the linked pages for the latest before you act on any of it.

• CRA GST/HST Notice 322: Recovery of the GST/HST under the digital economy measures

• CRA: Confirming a simplified GST/HST account number

• BC government: Sales taxes policy (PST is non-recoverable, GST is recoverable)

• BC Ministry of Finance: Notice to providers and purchasers of cloud software and services

• Financial Consumer Agency of Canada: credit card information box example

• Square Canada pricing

• Stripe Canada pricing

Drafted with AI assistance and edited by Ayla Radies.