EZ Pool Biller vs Skimmer: Reading Both Pricing Pages Side by Side

EZ Pool Biller's pricing page puts its own $35 plan next to Skimmer's $98 one and tells you a hundred-location company saves $1,740 a year by switching. Skimmer's pricing page does not mention EZ Pool Biller at all. Only one of those two pages is trying to win a comparison, which is the reason to read both rather than either.

This piece reads both on the same day, prices the same route from each published rate, and then checks EZ Pool Biller's comparison table against what Skimmer's own page says — because several of its rows do not survive that check. Pool Runs publishes this and sells pool service software. EZ Pool Biller is cheaper than Pool Runs at every route size below, and that is said plainly rather than buried.

What each page actually publishes

All three platforms here price on the same broad idea — you pay for the pools you serviced this month — but they count it slightly differently and they split features across tiers differently. Every figure in the table below was read from the vendor's own pricing page on 10 November 2026, the morning this was published. Where a page states nothing on a row, the cell says so instead of guessing.

Serviced location

A property counted in a billing month because it had at least one completed service visit inside that month. A platform pricing this way charges once for the location however many times it was visited, and charges nothing for a location that went unserviced. It is why a northern route costs less in January than in July, and why a per-location bill is not comparable with a per-technician one.

The single most important line in that table is the fourth one. EZ Pool Biller has one plan and no stated route-size band, so a 40-pool operation and a 400-pool operation buy the same product. Skimmer has three bands and puts route optimisation, quotes, job management, recurring work orders and its Orenda dosing calculator above the first one. That means a small route on Skimmer is on a genuinely smaller product, and a comparison that prices the $98 tier while describing the $49 tier's limits is describing neither accurately.

The same route, priced from each published rate

Below is the published subscription at four route sizes, worked out from the rates above and nothing else. Skimmer is shown on whichever tier its own page states for that route size: Getting Started at 40 pools, Scaling Up from 50 up. It excludes payment processing, texting, add-ons and tax.

EZ Pool Biller's own claim holds up. At 100 locations its rate gives $55 a month against Skimmer's $200, which is $1,740 over a year — the figure on its page is arithmetically right. What the page does not say is that the gap is almost entirely the per-location rate, fifty cents against two dollars, and that a platform charging four times as much per pool is either buying you something per pool or it is not. That is the question worth sitting with, and neither vendor's table answers it.

What a year costs, not a month

Every figure above is one month, and for most routes one month is the wrong unit. A platform that bills on serviced locations charges nothing for a pool that had no visit, so on a seasonal book the bill moves with the calendar instead of sitting still. Twelve of those months added together is the number you actually pay, and it is rarely twelve times the number in a one-month table. Every comparison you will read online, including the one on EZ Pool Biller's own pricing page, quotes a single month and leaves you to assume the other eleven look the same.

Take a northern route that services 250 pools from May through October and keeps 70 of them going through the winter, closing the rest. Nothing below is estimated. Each month is priced from the same published rates used earlier, the two halves of the year are added together, and the last two rows show what you would have concluded by reading the peak month as if it were flat.

The order does not change — EZ Pool Biller is still the cheapest and Skimmer still costs the most — but the distances do, and so does the shape of the decision. A flat reading of the peak month overstates all three annual bills by more than half. It overstates ours by the most, at 66 per cent, and the reason is worth understanding rather than glossing: the gap between our $1.75 and EZ Pool Biller's $0.50 only applies to properties past the fifty included in the base plan, and in a 70-pool winter there are only twenty of those. A one-month table measured at peak flatters whichever platform has the cheapest marginal rate, because peak is exactly where the marginal rate does the most work.

This arithmetic only behaves this way because all three of these platforms bill on serviced locations. A platform priced per technician does not fall at all when 180 pools come off the route for the winter, because the same crew is still employed in February and the same seats are still billed. We worked that difference through in Pool Office Manager vs Skimmer, which prices a per-user platform against a per-pool one month by month. If your route is genuinely seasonal, the billing unit is a bigger decision than the rate attached to it.

Where EZ Pool Biller's comparison table overstates

EZ Pool Biller's pricing page carries a feature table with a Skimmer column, using its own labels: Included, Extra Fee, Add-on, Not Available. Read against Skimmer's own pricing page the same day, four of those cells are misleading and two are fair. This is worth spelling out, because it is the table a buyer is most likely to take at face value.

The pattern in those rows is one thing done repeatedly: a tier is relabelled as a fee. "Extra Fee" suggests a line item bolted onto the price you were quoted. In Skimmer's case it means the feature sits on a plan that costs more and includes a dozen other things. Both facts matter to a buyer, and only one of them is on the page. We maintain our own Skimmer comparison, and the same discipline applies to it: if we cannot cite a figure to Skimmer's page with a date, it does not go in a cell.

What none of these three pages publishes

Three things are missing from all three of these pricing pages, and each one can move a bill further than the rates above. The first is the processing rate. EZ Pool Biller, Skimmer and Pool Runs all take card and ACH payments, and not one of the three states what it charges to do it. On a book running recurring monthly billing that line is routinely larger than the subscription: a few tenths of a percentage point across a year of collections will outweigh a dollar and a quarter per property comfortably. We went through what each platform charges you to take a payment separately, and the short version is that PoolDial is the only pool platform we have found that publishes its card and ACH rates at all. The silence is a choice, not an industry limitation.

The second is the trial. EZ Pool Biller offers a free trial without saying anywhere on its pricing page how long it lasts. Skimmer's first month free is a limited-time promotion restricted to new users on the Scaling Up plan, with usage past 49 locations billed in arrears once it ends — which is on the page, in the small print under the tiers, rather than in the headline that carries it. Ours is 30 days on the core plan. A trial you cannot find the length of is not a reason to rule a platform out, but it is a question to ask before you start moving customers into it, because the useful trial is the one long enough to run a full billing cycle inside.

The two edges: a very small route and a very large one

At the small end the money almost stops mattering. A 40-pool operation pays $35, $49 and $45 a month to EZ Pool Biller, Skimmer and us respectively — fourteen dollars separates the cheapest from the dearest, which is less than a single service visit is worth. What does matter at 40 pools is what Skimmer's $49 tier leaves out, and it is not a short list: route optimisation, recurring work orders, quotes and estimates, job management, the Orenda dosing calculator and live phone support all sit on the $98 plan, and service texts are billed per message rather than included. A small route buying Skimmer on price is buying a materially different product from the one every comparison table — EZ Pool Biller's included — prices against. That is the single most useful thing to take from this whole comparison: at the small end, read the tier, not the number.

At the large end all three stop publishing, at different points and with different degrees of candour. Skimmer states Enterprise custom pricing above 1,000 pools a month and says so plainly on the tier. We state volume pricing above 200 properties without attaching a figure to it, which is less useful than it should be and is on us rather than on anyone else. EZ Pool Biller publishes no ceiling at all, so its fifty cents is either genuinely flat to any route size or simply has not been tested in public — and from the outside there is no way to tell which. Past a few hundred pools every number on all three of these pages becomes an opening position in a negotiation rather than a price, and the right move is to ask all three for a written quote at your actual pool count instead of extrapolating from a published rate that was never meant to stretch that far.

Where each one is the right answer

EZ Pool Biller is the cheapest published subscription in this group at every size, and it is the only one of the three whose pricing page puts time tracking and payroll in the base price. If billing is the job, you do not want tiers, and you would rather have payroll in the same system than a second subscription, the arithmetic is hard to argue with. Skimmer is the deepest product here and the one with the most published surface area — bulk invoices, autopay, surcharging, sales tax reports, consumer financing, a dosing calculator built with Orenda, live phone support on the upper tier. At $2 a location it is the expensive option and it is not pretending otherwise; whether that is worth four times EZ Pool Biller's rate depends on how much of that surface you will actually use.

How to settle it for your own route

The short version

On published subscription alone, EZ Pool Biller wins this comparison at every route size, and its own $1,740 claim checks out. What its table gets wrong is Skimmer's shape: tiers described as fees, and a $98 plan priced against features drawn from the $49 one. Skimmer is the more expensive and the more capable product, and it is explicit about both. If you are weighing more than these two, we have put seven platforms side by side on what the subscription is counted on, and separately compared the payment processing rates that usually cost more than the software does.

And if you want to put your own pool count against the rates above rather than take anyone's table for it, our pricing page shows the arithmetic for a sample route, and a 30-day trial lets you run a real month of billing through it.