Docs · How we make money
The Back Office Billing Fee
PoolSpartan's entire business model is one line item: a flat $4.95 “Back Office Billing Fee” added to each invoice. By default it's paid by your customer, not by you. There is no subscription, no per-seat charge, no percentage cut of your service revenue.
What you (the pool service business) pay us
Zero. No subscription. No setup fee. No per-seat pricing. No percentage of the service price. No fees on payouts. PoolSpartan is free to use indefinitely.
The mobile app your crew uses (FieldSpartan) is also free.
What your customer pays
When your customer pays an invoice through PoolSpartan, here's what they see:
| Line | Goes to | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Service charges (your work) | You | $120.00 |
| Back Office Billing Fee — flat $4.95 | PoolSpartan | $4.95 |
| Card processing fee (optional, off by default) | Stripe (our processor) | $3.62 if you opted in |
| Sales tax (if your state taxes service) | State / local government | $10.20 |
| Total customer pays | $138.77 |
Every charge is its own line on the invoice. Nothing is hidden in a markup. Your customer can see exactly where each dollar goes — and wherever the Billing Fee appears (the invoice, the customer portal, the payment screen), PoolSpartan shows a short plain-language explanation alongside it. Most questions are answered before they're asked.
Per invoice — always.
$4.95 per invoice. If you send another invoice to the same customer, it's another $4.95.
That structure keeps billing tight — not just for you, but for your customer too. Smaller, predictable amounts paid on a clean rhythm.
See also: How to talk about the billing fee with your customers.
The Billing Fee amount is fixed
$4.95 per invoice, flat. You can't change the amount from inside the app — it's not a per-operator setting. If we ever change it, it changes for everyone, announced in advance. We picked flat (not a percentage of your invoice) on purpose: small jobs shouldn't subsidize big ones, and the work of processing an invoice is the same either way.
Two things you can configure
1. Who pays the Billing Fee
Two options, set per business in your PoolSpartan settings:
- Customer pays (default) — the $4.95 appears as a line item on the invoice, the customer pays it, you don't see it on your payout.
- Company pays — the fee is hidden from the customer's invoice; the $4.95 is deducted from your payout instead. Some operators prefer this for cleaner-looking invoices on commercial accounts.
Either way, PoolSpartan collects the same $4.95. The only difference is whose money it comes from.
On customer pays, some customers will ask about the line item. We wrote a guide: How to talk about the billing fee with your customers →
2. Card processing pass-through
Stripe (the payment processor we use) charges about 2.9% + $0.30 per card transaction and about 0.8% (capped at $5) for ACH bank transfers. By default you pay these.
You can flip on a setting that adds the processing fee to your customer's invoice as a separate line item, so they pay it instead. This is common in B2B / commercial pool service and increasingly accepted in residential.
To be clear: when you turn this on, the processing fee goes to Stripe, not to PoolSpartan. We don't take a cut of it. The toggle exists so you can decide whether the cost lives in your margin or on the invoice.
Why we built it this way
PoolSpartan is operator-built. Three observations from running pool routes shaped the model:
- Subscription software doesn't care if you grew. Most field-service SaaS charges you monthly whether you collected $10,000 or $100,000 last month. That's a misaligned incentive — they get paid for you logging in, not for you running a healthy business.
- Per-invoice means we earn when you collect. A slow week for you is a slow week for us. A bad customer who never pays earns us nothing. That puts our incentive directly on building the tools that help you actually collect — autopay, ACH, card-on-file, invoice reminders, portal payments.
Common questions
What if my customer disputes the Billing Fee?
It's a line item on the invoice — your customer pays it or disputes the whole invoice the same way they would any other charge. In practice this almost never comes up on residential pool service.
If it does come up often enough to matter, your option is to flip the global setting to “company pays the Billing Fee” — that absorbs the $4.95 on every invoice from then on, not just for the one customer. There's no per-customer override.
What about taxes on the Billing Fee?
In states where services are taxable (Arizona, Hawaii, New Mexico, South Dakota, West Virginia), the $4.95 is taxed at your local rate as part of the invoice. In service-tax-free states, it isn't. Stripe Tax handles the calculation automatically based on the customer's address. The tax goes to the state, not to us.
What about my crew — do they pay anything?
No. Pool pros run on FieldSpartan and that's free too. They get the day's route, take photos, log chemistry, sync back to you. No subscription, no in-app purchases.
How can you afford this?
We're betting that enough pool operators pay enough invoices through PoolSpartan that $4.95 × N adds up to a real business. A pool route doing $50K/month in invoices generates a few hundred invoices, which is a few hundred Billing Fees, which scales with you — but it scales only with invoices that actually get collected. That's the point. We grow when you grow. We don't when you don't.
Am I locked in?
No. Your customer list, visit history, and invoices export to CSV / Excel from inside the app any time. Stripe payouts go directly to your bank — PoolSpartan never sits between you and your money. No contract, no exit fee. You stay because the tools work, not because leaving is hard.
Ready to try it?
Sign-up takes a few minutes. No card up front, no contract, no sales call.
Still have questions?
Email support@poolspartan.com and we'll work it through. We don't hide the model — every honest question gets a plain answer.
See also: Support · Terms of Service · Privacy Policy