Fergus

Fergus is a cloud-based job management platform designed for trades and field service businesses. It covers the full job lifecycle from enquiry through to invoicing and payment. Core features include quoting with price books, job scheduling and tracking, timesheets, materials management, purchase orders, and invoicing with integrated payment processing.

The platform targets small-to-medium trades businesses, particularly plumbers, electricians, builders, HVAC contractors, and roofers. Its standout feature is real-time job financial summaries that show how labour, materials, and overheads affect profitability on each job, helping business owners avoid under-quoting. Fergus also offers a mobile app (Fergus Go) for field workers, supplier integrations for automated price book imports, and health and safety forms including SWMS.

Fergus uses per-user monthly pricing with no lock-in contracts and a 14-day free trial. The Basic plan starts from $53/month and covers core job management features like quoting, job cards, timesheets, scheduling, invoicing, and accounting integrations. The Professional plan starts from $75/month and adds GPS tracking, checklists, purchase orders, advanced reporting, and phone support. For teams of 10 or more, there's an Enterprise tier with custom pricing.

There are also add-on costs to be aware of: timesheet-only users from $22/month, contractor users at $4/day, SMS alerts at $15 per 100 texts, and certificates at $30-80/month depending on team size. Credit card payment processing sits at 2.95% plus $0.30 per transaction. Costs can add up quickly for larger teams when you factor in the add-ons.

Vendor lock-in risk with Fergus is moderate. On the positive side, the full data export feature means you can get your business data out in a compressed format, and the CSV export on reports gives you access to most operational data. Accounting data flows bidirectionally with Xero, MYOB, and QuickBooks, so that side of things stays portable.

The main lock-in concern is around workflow and process. If your team builds their daily operations around Fergus's mobile app, scheduling, and job tracking, switching platforms means retraining and process redesign. Job history and attachments may not transfer cleanly to a competitor. The API opens up some options for extracting data programmatically, but migration from Fergus to another platform would still require significant effort.

Fergus was founded in 2011 by Dan Pollard, a veteran tradesman in Auckland, New Zealand. Pollard built the software to solve problems in his own plumbing business, which grew from 4 to 24 employees using the platform. The company has raised $16.2M across two funding rounds, including a $15M Series B in 2022 led by Octopus Ventures with participation from EVP. At the time of that raise, Fergus had around 75 employees, with the majority in New Zealand and a growing UK team based in Manchester.

The platform now serves over 20,000 trades businesses across Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Fergus operates in a competitive market alongside Tradify, ServiceM8, and simPRO, and positions itself as the option with the strongest real-time job costing features. The company appears stable and well-capitalised, though it's still venture-backed and not yet profitable as far as public information suggests.

Fergus launched its open API in 2025, making it relatively new compared to more established platforms. Developers can generate Personal Access Tokens from their account settings for authentication. The API covers job creation, user management, and a webhooks management endpoint, with OpenAPI 3.0 documentation available at api.fergus.com/docs.

The API is functional but still maturing. Company-specific rate limiting was introduced in 2025, and the endpoint coverage is growing but doesn't yet match the full breadth of what the platform can do through its interface. For straightforward integrations, particularly syncing job data or triggering workflows, it will do the job. For anything more complex, expect to work within limitations and keep an eye on the release notes for new endpoints. Fergus also supports Zapier for no-code workflow automation, which may be the easier path for simpler integration needs.

Webhooks were introduced as part of the 2025 API expansion. A webhooks management API is available, though documentation on specific event types and payload formats is limited. This is a relatively new capability.

Fergus provides reasonable data portability for a platform of its size. You can import customers via CSV or sync them from your accounting software (Xero, MYOB, QuickBooks). Supplier price books can be imported via drag-and-drop. On the export side, most reports can be exported as CSV files, and Fergus offers a full data export feature for account holders that delivers a compressed file containing all business data.

The full data export is a positive sign, as many platforms in this space make it difficult to get everything out. However, the export is a manual request process rather than a self-service download, so it's not instant. For day-to-day data movement, the accounting integrations handle invoice syncing well, and the API opens up options for pulling data programmatically.

The developer experience with Fergus is adequate but not polished. API documentation is available via an OpenAPI 3.0 spec at api.fergus.com/docs, which gives you the basics of what endpoints exist and how to call them. There's also a Postman workspace available for testing.

That said, the API is still young. Documentation beyond the OpenAPI spec is thin, there's no dedicated developer portal with guides or tutorials, and community resources for building integrations are limited. There's no sandbox environment mentioned, so you'd be working against live data during development. If you're an experienced integrator, you can work with what's there. If you're hoping for hand-holding, you'll need to lean on Fergus support.