PoolTechDesk vs Skimmer

Pricing side by side

Skimmer publishes two paid tiers plus a custom Enterprise tier for 1,000+ pools: Getting Started and Scaling Up, both structured as a base rate covering the first 49 pools, plus a per-pool fee for everything beyond that. PoolTechDesk publishes three tiers as well, sized by team rather than by pool count, with no per-pool fee on any of them.

What the per-pool fee means at different sizes

Skimmer's base rate only covers the first 49 pools on either tier — past that, the bill grows by $1 or $2 per pool per month depending on tier. Running Skimmer's own published formula against three team sizes:

Skimmer totals are our own calculation applying Skimmer's published per-pool formula (getskimmer.com/pricing, snapshot 2026-07-11) to each profile — not a figure Skimmer itself publishes for these specific team sizes. A 3-tech or 8-tech operation needs Scaling Up for multi-tech work orders, which is also the tier that includes route optimization; Getting Started doesn't support assigning multiple technicians to one work order.

Route optimization: tier-gated on Skimmer, included everywhere on PoolTechDesk

As published, Skimmer's route optimization ships only with the Scaling Up tier — Getting Started includes a manual route builder without the optimization algorithm. PoolTechDesk includes route optimization on Starter, Growth and Pro alike; which plan you're on changes user count and admin features, not whether the optimizer is switched on.

Extra users vs. per-pool growth

PoolTechDesk charges a fixed rate per additional user ($15-22/mo depending on plan) on top of a flat base. Skimmer's cost grows with pool count rather than user count — the calculation above shows how that compounds as a route list grows past the first 49 pools.

A note on price stability

Skimmer's published tiers are list prices, and like any vendor's, they can change over time — that's a normal part of running a SaaS business, not a criticism. We don't see a published price-lock policy on their site as of this writing. What we can offer as a newer, smaller company is a specific written guarantee: whatever plan you sign up for is locked at that rate for 12 months, even if our list prices change during that period. See the pricing page for the full terms.

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