The Free Plan Is the Whole App. Here’s Exactly Where It Stops.

WaterMark was built to be the number one friend of pool companies. A field app you can read in direct sunlight. An office your team runs without a training course. Every advanced tool the big platforms sell, with a fraction of the thinking. English and Spanish, both first class.

The free plan is that app. Same build, with limits on it, and here they are before anything else: one tech, up to 50 customers, no credit card, no time limit. That’s what free pool service software means here. I earned that spec the long way. For months I asked pool people one question: what do you wish your software did? At supply houses. In driveways. To guys waiting on a case of tabs at the counter. I took the whole list home and built it.

What you actually get for $0

The field app you get free is the field app. Its high-contrast bold theme is engineered for direct sunlight, and the contrast is enforced by automated tests, not left to a setting somebody forgets to flip. It runs at full brightness on the job and puts your brightness back when you leave.

The day works the way a route works. Swipe done right off the route list. Next stop auto-advances. One tap for same-as-last-visit dosing. Big, glove-friendly targets. Auto-arrive when you pull up, opt-in, off by default, one tap to shut off. The app holds one job in progress at a time and asks you to pause or finish, so a day never tangles, and a paused job stays on today’s list.

It runs in Spanish end to end, not a half-translated settings screen. Daily-driver and secondary screens both, with checklists that come pre-translated. You can write a customer recap in one language and send it in the other, with a preview and a back-check before it goes.

What you do out of signal queues and replays exactly once when you’re back: arrivals, readings, photos, completions. Offline customer data is encrypted at rest.

Chemistry runs at full strength. LSI with the CYA correction most calculators skip, reasoning on screen. Dosing that refuses to guess when it doesn’t know the pool’s volume. Readings marked by source: measured, imported off a photometer, or estimated. The log keeps the recommended dose next to what you actually poured.

The office side runs the whole office

Add one customer and you have a working route in about thirty seconds. Bringing a book over? CSV import previews every row and hard-stops on the bad ones. Route Manager is drag-and-drop, and you can add a job right on the board. When a storm eats a Tuesday, one click reschedules the day.

What office people call out is the work the screen doesn’t hand them. The Command Center only surfaces confirmed signals that need a human, so nobody starts the morning triaging noise. Team chat is one screen. Timesheet corrections take seconds. Night-before route emails go to the techs, so nobody calls at 6 a.m. asking what they have. There’s an activity stream when you need to know what actually happened, and a report studio where you pin the modules you read. None of it needs a training week. Run your own numbers through the ROI calculator.

The advanced tools ship in the app

It is all in the app, the same list the big platforms hold for their top tier:

• Memberships that auto-bill the card on file, with overdue reminders that never nag somebody who already paid.
• Same-day invoicing off a completed visit, payment plans, credit memos, statements, prepay packages, per-state sales tax.
• Two-way QuickBooks Online sync, free. Xero is a $15 add-on on paid plans. Card payments through Stripe with zero markup from me.
• Payroll with overtime and commissions, business units, recurring seasonal openings and closings that cascade.
• Parts and chemical inventory down to each truck, custom job types with their own checklists and forms, equipment health tracking that drafts the replacement quote.
• Self-hosted road-distance route optimization, so no per-lookup vendor bill sits behind it. A live map so a customer can watch the truck coming, if you turn it on.
• Public API read and write, Zapier, Slack, calendar feeds both directions. Review funnel and referral loops. Margin autopilot with a hard 20% cap in the code that only the owner can touch.

Where the free plan stops

The caps are one tech and 50 customers. The exclusion is texting and the AI features, including Ask-AI and the receptionist that answers your phone line. Those cost me money every time they run, so they live on the paid plans. On a paid plan, 1,000 texts a month are included and the next thousand is $25. That’s the number, in place of the word “unlimited.”

Outgrow Starter and it’s $49 a month solo, plus $20 for each tech you add, month to month. Cancel is a button, not an email to a rep. Your data exports on every tier, free included. Want it lined up against the paid platforms? That’s the comparison page. I wrote up what shopping ServiceTitan actually cost me back when I was doing the shopping.

Why the free plan is the real app

A hollowed-out free tier hurts exactly the guys who told me what to build. Sun readability, fewer taps, Spanish in the field, an office screen nobody has to study, every advanced tool with a fraction of the thinking. That list came out of driveway conversations, not a roadmap meeting, and it ships to everybody.

So run your real route on it. Fifty customers is a real book of business, and if you pass it, the app did its job. Start free.

Quick answers

Is WaterMark's free pool service software actually free?
Yes. Starter is $0 for one tech and up to 50 customers, with no credit card and no time limit. Texting and the AI features run on the paid plans. Your data exports on every tier, free included.

What do I give up on the free plan?
One tech and 50 customers are the caps. The capability that isn't on Starter is texting and the AI features, including Ask-AI and the AI receptionist, because those cost money every time they run. Xero is a $15 add-on on paid plans. Past that it's the same app: the sun-readable field screens, the offline queue, Spanish, chemistry and dosing, invoicing, and the office dashboard. Free accounts run the same build everybody else runs.

Can I get my data out if I leave?
Yes, on every tier including free. Full export. Ask any software you're evaluating for the same thing before you hand it a season of history.