Pool Routing Software: How Six Vendors Actually Charge, and How to Price Your Own Route

Search for the best pool routing software and you will find a page published by a pool software company that ranks itself first. There were at least three of those before yesterday, and there is one more today. We are a pool software company too, so this is not going to be a ranking — a ranking from us would be worth exactly as much as theirs.

What is genuinely hard to find, and what an owner actually needs before a demo call, is a straight answer to a narrower question: how does each of these companies charge, and which charging model is cheapest for a route shaped like mine? That question has a real answer, the answer is arithmetic rather than opinion, and it is answerable from public pages. So that is what this is. Every figure below comes from the named vendor's own pricing page, fetched on 2026-10-09. Where a vendor does not publish a number, the cell says so instead of carrying an estimate.

Disclosure, up front: we make Pool Runs, and Pool Runs is one of the six. On published base rates alone it is not the cheapest of them — two of the five others come out lower at both of the route sizes worked through below. We have left that in, because a comparison you cannot lose is not a comparison. Our own numbers are on our pricing page and you should check them against what follows.

The two meters, and what each one punishes

Every vendor in this market has picked one of two things to count. Either it counts the pools on your book, or it counts the people who log in. Everything else about the commercial relationship follows from that single choice, and it is the one thing most comparison articles skip past on the way to a feature grid.

A per-pool meter means winning twenty accounts raises your software bill and hiring a technician does not. A per-seat meter means the reverse: the bill is flat while you grow the book and steps up the day you put a fourth person in a truck. Neither is a trick. They are bets on different customers, and the question is only which bet happens to fit you. The uncomfortable corollary is that the vendor who is cheapest for the company down the road may be the most expensive one for you, which is why their recommendation is nearly worthless to you.

Route optimization vs route building

Route building means creating and holding the list of stops that make up a day or a week. Route optimization means reordering those stops so the driving between them is as short as possible. Most vendors publish both, but some sell them separately or put optimization on a higher tier, so a plan that advertises routing may only give you the first one. It is worth asking which you are being quoted.

Two things in that table deserve more than a cell. Pool Office Manager counts active users rather than technicians, and it says so plainly — so an office manager and a bookkeeper are two more seats, which is a materially different sum from counting trucks. It does let seasonal companies deactivate users off-season, which is a sensible answer to the obvious objection. And Pool Brain is the one you cannot total at all: it publishes $65 per technician, says unlimited office users are included, and renders the base and monthly figures as blanks. That is not a criticism of the product, but it does mean one row of your spreadsheet stays empty until you make a phone call. Make that call first rather than last.

Two real route shapes, priced from published figures only

Here is the same six vendors at two route sizes that bracket most of this market. Seats are counted as technicians only, with no extra office users, which is the kindest reading for the per-seat vendors and worth remembering when you do your own sum. Add-ons are excluded from both columns.

Read down the columns rather than across the rows and the pattern is unmistakable: the per-seat vendors sit at the top of both lists and the gap widens as the book grows, because their meter never noticed the extra eighty pools. At 200 pools and four technicians PayThePoolMan's published figure is roughly a third of ours and roughly a quarter of Skimmer's Scaling Up. Any pool software company that tells you per-pool pricing is simply fairer is selling you its own meter, and that includes us.

The honest qualification runs the other way too, and there are three parts to it. First, the per-seat figures assume technicians only; a company with two office staff adds $50 a month on Pool Office Manager and nothing on a per-pool plan. Second, the per-pool vendors publish list prices that stop applying at a certain size — ours says to contact us above 200 properties, so the arithmetic in the right-hand column is the edge of the published rate rather than a quote. Third, and most importantly, these are base rates and not what the software does: the comparison above deliberately makes no claim about what any of these six include beyond whether route optimization is in the base, because that is the only feature question we could answer from public pages with confidence. Anyone who hands you a six-vendor feature grid assembled in an afternoon has guessed at most of it.

Add-ons are where published totals and real invoices part company, and they are worth pricing before you choose rather than after. From the same pages on the same day: Skimmer lists AI Phone at $99/month, Marketing Suite at $150/month, Bookkeeping from $198/month, and Service Texts at $0.029 per message on the entry tier. Pool Office Manager lists QuickBooks Online at $25/month, customer texting from $10/month and video storage at $25/month. PayThePoolMan lists its customer app at $25/month for the whole company and integrated payroll at $12 per employee per month plus a sign-up fee. Pool Runs has two add-ons at $50/month each, or $80 for both. Pool Brain states that all features are included. PoolProof publishes no add-on list.

What route optimization actually does, and what it will not fix

Optimization reorders the stops you have already assigned to a day so that the driving between them is shorter. That is the whole of it, and it is genuinely worth money on a sprawling day. What it cannot do is fix a route that is wrong at a level above the ordering. If Tuesday contains stops in three towns, no reordering saves you — the fix is reassigning the stops, which is a zoning problem rather than a sequencing one. It also does not know that the house with the oak tree takes thirty-five minutes in October and twelve in February, so a perfectly ordered day can still run late for reasons the optimizer never saw.

This matters commercially because routing is the feature almost everyone shops on and the one where demos look identical. Six platforms will all show you a day collapsing into a neat line on a map. The things that actually differ are duller and harder to see in a demo: whether a technician can resequence from the truck or only the office can do it from a desk, whether live traffic is taken into account or only distance, whether you can pin a start and end address, and what happens to the rest of the day when one stop is skipped. Those are the questions to ask, and none of them are on a pricing page — ours included.

Working out which meter you are on

1. 1

   Count the pools on the book and the people who would need a login

   Count logins, not trucks. Office staff, a bookkeeper and a part-timer who covers Saturdays are all seats on a per-seat plan, and leaving them out is how a quote turns out to be wrong by a third.

2. 2

   Divide the first by the second

   High pools per seat means a per-seat meter is structurally in your favour. Low pools per seat — a commercial-heavy book, or a lot of office staff — means a per-pool meter is. That one division does more work than any feature grid.

3. 3

   Price each candidate at your real numbers, on the tier you would actually need

   Not the headline. The tier that contains the capability you would walk away without, plus the add-ons that cover texting if you text customers, plus any per-transaction card fees.

4. 4

   Price it again at the book you expect in two years

   This is the step people skip, and it is the one the meter is designed to catch. Add the accounts you plan to win and the technician you plan to hire, and run both sums again. If the ranking changes, you have found the real decision.

5. 5

   Trial on one real route through a full billing cycle

   Scheduling problems show up in week one. Billing problems show up at month-end, which is usually after the trial has expired. Four of the six publish a 30-day trial or guarantee, so there is no good reason to decide on a demo.

The short version

There is no best pool routing software, and the pages that say otherwise are written by the companies that would benefit. There is a meter that suits your route and a meter that does not, and the division that tells you which is one you can do on the back of a route sheet in a minute. If your pools per seat are high, start with the per-seat vendors and make them tell you their base price. If your pools per seat are low, or you have more office staff than trucks, the per-pool vendors will usually come out ahead. Then and only then is it worth sitting through six demos.

For what it is worth on our side of it: Pool Runs is a per-property meter with unlimited users and technicians, so office staff are free and hiring never moves the bill, and route optimization is in the core plan rather than on a tier. On a book of several hundred pools run by two or three people, the table above says a per-technician vendor will quote you less, and we would rather you knew that from us. Our head-to-head comparisons go into more detail on the two closest alternatives, and you can run your own route through a trial if the arithmetic lands our way.