What the $15 seat actually buys

Apptivo sells itself as 65 business apps behind one login: CRM, quotes, invoices, projects, work orders, help desk cases, campaigns. The cheapest seat gets 18 of them. Lite, at $15 per user per month billed annually ($20 month to month), covers Leads, Customers, Contacts, Opportunities, Estimates, Items, Employees and Suppliers. That is a contact-and-deal CRM with quoting. Projects, Timesheets, Invoices, Contracts, Work Orders, Cases, Orders, Purchase Orders, Inventory and Campaigns all start one tier up.

The trial makes the gap easy to miss. Apptivo's only free trial runs 14 days, needs no credit card, and is "exclusive to the Ultimate plan" - the $40 seat. So two weeks of testing show you 57 apps, email sequences, SMS and the app builder, and the plan most small teams then buy quietly removes most of it. There is no free plan on the pricing page to fall back on either.

Read Apptivo as two products. Lite is a modest $15 CRM with no mass email at all, five custom reports and 1 GB of storage per user. Premium, at $25, is the all-in-one suite the marketing describes. Most of this review is about Premium.

Pricing and plan limits

Prices below were checked on apptivo.com/app-pricing on November 10, 2026. Billing is per user with no seat minimum stated, and Apptivo takes Visa, MasterCard and PayPal.

The mass email row decides more purchases than any other. Its quota is zero on Lite, so a Lite team cannot send a newsletter or a bulk follow-up from the CRM. Premium allows 1,000 per user per month, but email sequences - automated follow-up chains - are Ultimate-only, along with SMS, CPQ, territory management, custom branding and the app builder. Webhooks are on every plan, which helps if you intend to push events into another system yourself.

At $15, Lite costs the same as the single plan of Less Annoying CRM, which includes every feature that product has. Apptivo gives you 18 apps for the same money.

Several costs are not published at all. Onboarding is paid by the hour - a 60-minute quick-start session exists - but the rate is not listed. Prepaid credits are sold under Manage Your Account with no price shown, and the Terms warn that "additional fees could apply based on actual usage" without saying which. No support response time is given for any plan. The FAQ cannot even agree on rollout length: "6 to 8 weeks" in one answer, "3 to 6 weeks" in another.

Premium: where the all-in-one starts

Apptivo pitches Premium as "suitable for fast-growing teams that need an all-in-one CRM", and at $25 per seat billed annually it is the plan worth evaluating. It adds 28 apps over Lite, and the pieces a service business strings together - quote, contract, work order, invoice - finally live in one account. Quotes come with templates, e-signature and approval workflows. Invoicing handles recurring invoices and subscription billing, with Xero and QuickBooks integrations on the accounting end. Fields, layouts, reports and dashboards are customised by drag and drop, inside the per-plan caps in the table above.

Work orders and field service

Apptivo markets Field Service as its own product, but the pricing matrix has no row by that name. The app behind it is Work Orders, which starts at Premium. The field service page claims a dispatch calendar that assigns jobs by skill, availability and job type, annual maintenance contracts, and a mobile technician app with Google Maps routing, pre-visit customer alerts and digital signatures. For a five-person maintenance firm this is the strongest argument for Apptivo. A separate field-service tool would mean a second subscription and a second customer list.

Cases and help desk

Help desk follows the same pattern: marketed separately, built on the Cases app, Premium and up. The claimed features are email-to-ticket, auto-assignment by query type or skill, SLA rules and SLA reports, a customer portal, and VoIP integrations with RingCentral, Asterisk and Nexmo, plus Slack and a REST API. One mismatch to check before you commit. The help desk page promises a branded portal, while Custom Branding is an Ultimate-only line in the pricing matrix. Ask which one Premium gets.

"No contract", says the pricing page

The pricing page header reads "Simple Plans • No Contract • No Credit Card", and its FAQ says "You are certainly not bound by any contracts or commitments." The Terms and Conditions disagree. Section 12.1 says the agreement "shall remain in full force and effect for one year" and is then "renewed automatically for successive one-year periods". Section 5 makes payment obligations "non-cancelable" and fees "non-refundable", and the narrow refund in section 5.5 excludes discounted annual plans outright.

There is no cancellation fee, and a cancelled account stays active until the end of the period you paid for. But the $15, $25 and $40 prices are the annual ones, and a year paid up front is gone if you leave in month two. Pay monthly for the first quarter, at $5 to $10 more per seat, until you are sure. By their own date line, the Terms were last updated on May 24, 2018.

A Trustpilot reviewer in May 2026 described what happened after changing bank cards: "they held my database hostage the same way ransomware would." Trustpilot holds only seven reviews of Apptivo, for a TrustScore of 2.5, so treat that as one account rather than a pattern. Section 12.2 does reserve the right to "delete or clean up any unused accounts", though. Keep your own backups.

Security paperwork and a quiet changelog

Apptivo runs on Google Kubernetes Engine on Google Cloud, with data in Google Cloud Storage and Elasticsearch. No region is named, so get EU data residency in writing if you need it. The data security page says Apptivo is "SSAE18 SOC2 Type II certified, EU-U.S. privacy shield compliant, and GDPR compliant". The same page says "the most recent audit was completed in July 2021 and the next review is July 2022." Nothing later is posted. That does not prove the certification lapsed. It does mean a buyer whose security questionnaire asks for a current SOC 2 report has to request one, and Privacy Shield itself was struck down by the EU's top court in July 2020.

The product is just as still. The newest entry in Apptivo's product-updates blog is "Release Notes as of FEB 15,2024". We found no AI assistant, AI forecasting or generated email drafts on the pricing or product pages, and TechRadar's review notes the same absence.

Users rate it well anyway - around 4.4 out of 5 on both Capterra and G2. Where criticism surfaces, it is about support. A January 2026 Trustpilot review titled "Failing customer support" says support "used to be ok but now is pretty absent". That sits awkwardly next to a pricing table promising 24/7 email and live chat and 24/5 phone on every paid plan.

Getting your data out

Leaving is manageable. Every plan can download data as CSV or XLSX, and the help centre shows the route per app: Bulk Actions, Export, .csv, then Current View or All fields. That makes a full move one file per app - contacts, opportunities, quotes, invoices - with the links between them rebuilt at the other end. Every plan also includes a manual backup, which Apptivo describes as letting you "periodically perform manual backups of your entire data". Take one before you cancel.

Apptivo says client data "can be deleted on demand at any time" through a self-delete feature. The privacy policy keeps information "for as long as your account is active or as needed to provide you services" and gives no retention period in days after cancellation.

Verdict

Buy Premium if you run a small service business - trades, agencies, maintenance contractors - and want quotes, invoices, work orders and support tickets in one account for $25 a seat billed annually. That bundle is the reason to choose Apptivo, and Premium is the cheapest plan that has it.

Skip Lite. It is 18 apps with no mass email and 1 GB of storage. Less Annoying CRM charges the same $15 for everything it does, and Vtiger sells an all-in-one seat from $12, with a 15-user ceiling.

Skip Apptivo altogether if you want a CRM that is visibly moving - AI features, release notes newer than February 2024 - or a vendor that can show a current SOC 2 report without being asked. Zoho CRM is the closer fit there, and our CRM roundup compares six options.

Whichever plan you pick, start on monthly billing. The "No Contract" line on the pricing page does not survive a reading of the Terms.

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