Why Trestle
Priced against the field. Built where they cannot follow.
Every platform in this category charges for something. What they charge for is the whole story. We meter firm size and geography — and that single decision is the one thing a competitor cannot copy on a Tuesday.
We are not cheaper because we are worse. We are cheaper because we are paid for a different thing.
The same builder, priced ten ways
An eight-person residential builder in Manila.
One team, one set of needs: scheduling, daily logs, budgets, job costing, a client portal. Below is what each platform would invoice that firm every month, converted at ₱61.84.
Trestle Growth
₱5,590 / $90
Jobber Grow
₱7,421 / $120
Odoo Custom, 10 users
₱8,410 / $136
Houzz Pro
₱9,833 / $159
Contractor Foreman Plus
₱10,265 / $166
JobTread, 1 + 7 users
₱17,624 / $285
Buildertrend Essential
₱20,964 / $339
Procore, reported floor
₱23,190 / $375
Fieldwire Business, 8 seats
₱29,188 / $472
Autodesk Build, 8 seats
₱69,261 / $1,120
None of these include implementation. Odoo adds ₱300,000–1,500,000 of Philippine consulting before day one; Procore adds $10,000–30,000; Buildertrend adds $400–1,500. Trestle includes onboarding in the subscription.
Strip out the feature lists
There are only four meters in this category. We run a fifth.
A meter is the variable that makes the invoice go up. It is chosen once, early, and becomes almost impossible to change.
01
Construction volume
Procore · Buildertrend · Houzz Pro
The bill is a function of what the contractor builds. It asks what you earn — and punishes you for winning bigger jobs.
It requires asking what the customer earns. In a market wary of disclosure, a foreign vendor asking a Philippine contractor to declare annual construction volume is commercially radioactive — which is why these platforms no longer publish a price.
02
Seats
Fieldwire · Autodesk · JobTread
Every person who logs in is billable — foremen, subcontractors, sometimes the client. A daily log nobody fills in is worthless.
It charges for the thing construction is made of. Under a seat meter every extra person on a project is a reason not to invite them in — which breaks the product.
03
Feature gates
Contractor Foreman · Jobber
A low headline price, with the features a builder actually needs placed three tiers up. The advertised number is not the number.
Contractor Foreman advertises $49. Scheduling, daily logs, time cards and job costing — the four things a builder came for — sit at $166. The gap is not a misunderstanding; it is the design.
04
Payment flow
Buildertrend · Houzz Pro · Jobber
A percentage of every peso the contractor collects from their own client. It appears on no pricing page.
It taxes money that never left the country. On ₱500,000 / $8,086 a month of collections, Buildertrend's 2.99% plus fixed fees is ₱17,164 a month — three times the whole Trestle subscription.
05
Firm size — ours
Trestle
A published price set by plan and seats, shown in the open before you sign up. It moves only when you grow into another plan — never at renewal, never because you won a bigger job. We never ask what a contractor earns.
It never rises because the contractor won a bigger job, hired a foreman, or invited a client to look at their own project. That is the moat.
The renewal
The price you agree to is not the price you keep paying. Except here.
Procore customers report 5–14% annual increases, compounded. A Trestle price moves for exactly one reason: you grew into a bigger plan or added seats. It never changes at renewal, and if a market-wide change ever happens it is applied to every customer in your market at once, announced in advance. The incumbent's renewal is a negotiation. Ours isn't — the price you agreed to is the price you keep paying.
The moat
Ranked by how much it would really hold.
Revenue-model conflict
Procore, Buildertrend and Houzz Pro cannot promise never to meter volume, because volume is their meter. Fieldwire and Autodesk cannot give away field seats, because seats are their revenue. Matching us means rebuilding their revenue line.
Cost base
A senior engineer in Manila is fully loaded at $38,422 a year against $225,000 in the United States — a 5.9× gap. That is what lets us include onboarding and still hold 88% gross margin at ₱5,590 / $90.
Local rails and compliance
BIR e-invoicing, withholding tax, InstaPay and PESONet, progress billing that matches how Philippine contractors actually invoice. Roughly eighteen months of focused work for a well-funded competitor. It buys time, not permanence.
Published pricing
Anyone can publish a price tomorrow. What they cannot easily do is publish one that is complete — because a complete price forecloses the negotiation their sales model depends on. It wins the first meeting, not the fifth year.
We are not claiming the moat is permanent. Only that it is expensive enough to cross that the people best placed to cross it have consistently chosen not to.
4.1×
cheaper than Procore's reported floor, before implementation
13.4×
cheaper in year one, once implementation is counted
5.9×
the engineering cost gap that makes the price possible
2 of 4
moat layers that survive a determined, well-funded response
Read the arithmetic