Everything the US research turned up, in one place: what to keep, fix and cut, every way we could price it weighed honestly against each other, who we sell to, and exactly how the cold-call engine runs. Built so you three can decide, not so anyone decides for you.
AuxBOS is a genuinely capable all-in-one business system, and the market it’s entering is crowded, not empty. Both are true. We don’t win by being the only one who does CRM + HR + finance in one place — Odoo, Zoho, and two free open-source tools already do that. We win on three things nobody else nails: the modules being one real system instead of five stitched apps, an honest sales and support motion, and going deep on one kind of customer — agencies.
The product is real: enforced multi-tenant auth, a working general ledger, three portals, mobile-responsive. It has one serious security bug (fixable in days) and needs a couple of integrations before it’s sellable. Nothing here is a reason not to do this. It’s a reason to fix a short list first.
The money question — is a company really going to pay a lot for a back-end system they can technically live without? — is the right question, and the answer is: only if we sell relief from a specific pain, to a specific customer, and only after we have a few reference clients. The price follows the pain, not the feature list. That’s what this whole document is built around.
We verified real 2026 pricing across the whole field. The takeaway: the “all-in-one” space is packed from free to $250 a seat — so our edge can’t be “we do everything.” It has to be sharper than that.
| Who we’re really up against | Price | What it means for us |
|---|---|---|
| ERPNext / Dolibarr | FREE | Open-source, do CRM + HR + accounting. Proof breadth alone is not a moat. |
| Odoo | $25–61/user/mo | 15+ years, deep, huge partner network. Sits where we want to. |
| Zoho One | $37–90/user/mo | 45+ apps, real payroll in all 50 states. The incumbent to beat on trust, not features. |
| GoHighLevel | $97–497/mo | Our closest role model — won agencies with all-in-one + a reseller army. Study this one. |
| CodeCanyon scripts (ERPGo etc.) | $59–99 one-time | PHP all-in-ones with our exact pitch, sold cheap. The floor of the market. |
All prices verified against vendor pages, August 2026. Full sourced research in the team folder.
Half-true, and worth being precise about so we don’t get caught overclaiming. Salesforce genuinely does not natively do HR, payroll, or accounting — a Salesforce shop stacks three separate vendors and pays $300–500 per user per month. So “one login for what Salesforce bills you three ways for” is a real, true line. But Salesforce isn’t our competition — Odoo and Zoho are, and they already do the all-in-one thing. We should use the Salesforce line as a hook, never as the core claim. Overclaiming is exactly what’s driving buyers off Odoo right now (four “is Odoo a scam” threads in under a year). Honesty is our edge; let’s not spend it.
The one gap worth everything. Across every incumbent, users say the same thing: “one system” is a lie — getting a quote to become an invoice to become a project requires a paid consultant, because the modules are parallel apps under one login, not one database. If AuxBOS is genuinely one data model where a record flows through the whole business with no glue code, that is the product. That’s the first thing we need to confirm internally (Q1 at the end).
This is the pitch we center on, and it’s honest. Odoo, Zoho, HubSpot — you configure inside their box, and any real change means hiring a $150/hour consultant and waiting. Because we are the ones who built AuxBOS and we do the customizing as part of the deal, we can promise something none of them can at this price: the system is molded to exactly how the client’s business runs — rename anything, add fields and workflows, turn modules on or off, or have us build what they’re missing — included, done for them, no third party.
Every other subscription is a rented template. Ours is their system. That’s a real differentiator, it’s true, and it’s the one thing a cold caller can say in one sentence that no competitor can match. It leads both the pitch and the buyer doc.
Ranked. Number one is non-negotiable — everything else waits behind it.
Rehman’s right that some of this is just noise. Cutting or hiding it makes the product tighter, the demo cleaner, and stops us overclaiming:
Rule of thumb: if it doesn’t help sell an agency and it’s not finished, it shouldn’t be visible in the demo. A tight system that does eight things perfectly beats a bloated one that does twenty things halfway.
This is the decision. Five real business models, each with its natural pricing structure, honest pros and cons, and a call. Read all five, then we pick. My lean is flagged, but the choice is ours together.
Sales-led, mid-ticket. We charge a one-time fee to stand it up and configure it for the agency, then a monthly retainer for hosting, support and small changes. Tiered Good/Better/Best. This is the sweet spot: high enough per-deal to pay commissions, low enough to actually close, light enough to fulfill without a custom build every time.
The Odoo/NetSuite-partner model: big upfront to build it around the client’s exact workflow, plus a fat retainer. Best ACV in the whole menu. But heavy fulfillment (real dev per client), harder close, and it genuinely needs reference customers first — nobody hands a no-name vendor $50K without proof.
Anyone signs up on a website, adds their team, pays monthly. Scales infinitely with no per-deal sales effort. But this is a marketing-and-product business, not a sales business — it needs a content/ads/affiliate machine and a product that onboards itself, neither of which we have yet. It also needs the checkout built (section 06) before it can even function.
Sell it to agencies who rebrand it and resell it to their clients under their own name. This is exactly how GoHighLevel prints money. It solves our biggest weakness — no brand — because the reseller’s brand carries the trust. Could run alongside model A.
Lead with A (setup + retainer, sold by the cold-call team) to get paying agency references and learn exactly who buys and why. Layer in the payment rake (section 06) on every client from day one. Once we know what converts and the product onboards itself, open C (self-serve) and/or D (white-label) as expansion. Don’t run everything cold — earn the right to scale.
| Lever | Real range | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Setup / onboarding fee | $3–15K | One-time. Funds the hand-holding a new vendor must give. |
| Monthly retainer | $500–6K/mo | Hosting + support + small changes. Make it mandatory. |
| Tiered plans | Good/Better/Best | Always. Three options anchors the middle one. |
| Per-seat | $20–80/user/mo | Only for a self-serve tier. Too low-ACV for cold-callers alone. |
| Payment rake | 0.5–1% of volume | The sleeper. Passive, scales with client success. See 06. |
| Change-order dev | $150–250/hr billed | Custom work beyond the retainer, signed before we build. |
| White-label wholesale | $297–497/mo | Per reseller agency, unlimited sub-accounts. |
The honest number, because Rehman asked. The $50–150K figures are real for the category — but they go to established vendors with references. On day one we will not close $50K deals. Realistic first 5 clients: $3–10K setup + $300–800/mo, priced low on purpose to buy proof. After references: $10–25K + $1–2K/mo. Big clients later: $30–75K. And there’s a floor — commission-only selling stops paying below ~$5–8K a deal, because the closer’s cut gets too small. That floor is the reason we can’t go cheap and keep a sales team, and the reason mid-ticket (model A) is the answer.
I was wrong to lead with marketing agencies, and Rehman’s agency buddies are why. A lean agency is client-heavy but not workforce-heavy — no HR team, no attendance, no payroll headache — so half of AuxBOS is dead weight to them. The product only earns a five-figure price when a business needs all of it. So the real question isn’t “who serves clients,” it’s “who runs a real hourly workforce and serves clients and delivers work and bills for it.”
| Axis | The question | Where agencies fail |
|---|---|---|
| Workforce | Enough employees that HR, attendance, scheduling & payroll genuinely matter? | FAIL — tiny team |
| Clients | Real customer relationships needing a pipeline + portal? | Pass |
| Delivery | Jobs / projects / service work to assign and track? | Pass |
| Money | They invoice and run their own books? | Partial |
| Opening | No dominant cheap all-in-one already owns them? | FAIL — GHL owns them |
The businesses that score high on all five are boring, labor-heavy service businesses. And here’s the tell that confirms it: AuxBOS is unusually heavy on HR, attendance, and employee screenshot-tracking. That’s not a quirk — it’s a fingerprint of who it was really built for. The product has been pointing at its true customer the whole time: operations that run a big hourly workforce.
Verified from the research: real pain starts around 15 employees (informal HR breaks), turns acute and budget-justifying at 50 employees / $8–15M (ACA & FMLA compliance cliffs, QuickBooks straining). Below 15, no pain; above ~100, the enterprise incumbents (Bullhorn, WinTeam, ServiceTitan) take over. The 25–75 employee band is our zone — big enough to feel it and afford $5–30K, too small for the enterprise tools to bother with.
The positioning line, near-verbatim from the staffing industry’s own 2026 research: “One system that moves your data in real time, instead of five systems that email each other.” Point that at a business drowning in a real workforce, and it’s a painkiller with a dollar figure attached.
Three research threads, cross-checked. Ranked by need fit × how soft the incumbents are × how easy they are to find. This is the list to hand a sales team.
| Vertical | US size | Why it wins |
|---|---|---|
| BPO / call centers (50–500 seats) | low thousands | The single best fit found. Their workforce data IS their billing data (they bill clients per staffed hour/seat). The screenshot-tracking feature is a core requirement here, not a liability. Today they stitch a monitoring tool + Excel + CRM and undercharge clients from bad reconciliation — we stop provable revenue leakage. |
| Staffing / recruiting agencies (<75 staff) | ~27,000 | Cleanest 4-for-4: the agency is the employer of record for a huge managed workforce. Bullhorn is expensive & gappy (billing 3.0/5, mobile 1.6/5), none bundle a real ledger. Their own industry says it’s converging to “one system.” Proven reseller channel exists (staffing SI consultants). Integrate payroll. |
| Commercial janitorial / facilities (20–150 staff) | ~53,000 | Most fragmented vertical, clearest dead zone: cheap tools (Swept) skip payroll/GL entirely; the only full ERP (WinTeam) serves 100+ and scores 1.0–1.5/5 on payroll & mobile from its own customers. 50–100% turnover makes the HR case concrete. |
| Security guard companies (20–150 guards) | ~12,500 | Best functional fit (100–150% turnover, per-site billing) AND a timely displacement: Trackforce’s 2026 rebrand folded Silvertrac (the SMB favorite) into an enterprise-first platform, orphaning exactly our-size customers right now. A warm list this quarter. |
| Vertical | US size | Why it’s here |
|---|---|---|
| Manufacturing job shops / fabricators | ~20–24K shops | Cleanest job = project = invoice mapping. Shop-ERPs ignore HR/CRM. NIST MEP (1,400 advisors, all 50 states) is a ready-made referral channel. |
| Restoration & remediation | ~60,000 | Crews + insurance/TPA clients + multi-week jobs + billing. Quantified pain: 8–15 hrs/week lost to manual work. Dual insurance-carrier CRM nobody models. |
| Construction subs (private-commercial, W-2 crews) | subset of ~490K | Real gap between Procore (too big) and Buildertrend (wrong fit). Target 15–100 W-2 crew, avoid government / certified-payroll work. |
| Independent insurance agencies (10–50 staff) | fragmented | Sleeper. Producers (workforce) + policyholder book (CRM) + renewals/claims (delivery) + commissions (billing). AMS360/EZLynx do policy data only; the rest is QuickBooks + spreadsheets. |
Veterinary groups (multi-DVM, cash-pay heavy), trade/vocational schools (sub-500 students, stuck between heavy SIS and spreadsheets), non-profits with paid staff (very overlooked, but budget-constrained & slower), med-spa chains (PE roll-up wave, but position behind the booking tool, not against it), catering/events companies (documented CRM-vs-staffing seam).
Do NOT waste dials here. Field services & movers (dispatch is the product, out of scope), home care (EVV/Medicaid lock-in), property management (the “workforce” is 1099 vendors, and the software is cheap & commoditized), and fitness / auto repair / landscaping / fitness studios / childcare (mature, well-funded incumbents already own the workflow). Churches don’t invoice at all. These fail the Need Matrix or the Opening test.
The good news about targeting boring workforce-heavy verticals: they live in trade associations and licensing boards with real directories and real phone numbers — far cleaner lists than scraping agencies, and TCPA-friendly business landlines.
| Vertical | Where to find them |
|---|---|
| BPO / call centers | IAOP, ContactCenterWorld (230,000 members), Customer Contact Week attendee lists, LinkedIn Sales Nav NAICS 561422 at 50–500 staff |
| Staffing / recruiting | American Staffing Association (ASA) directory, Bullhorn Marketplace partner list, state staffing associations |
| Janitorial / facilities | BSCAI (1,000+ member firms), ISSA, CleanLink trade press |
| Security guard | State security-licensing boards (best list), ASIS International, warm Silvertrac-refugee lists |
| Manufacturing job shops | NTMA (1,000 members, 26 chapters), PMA, FMA / FABTECH, Thomasnet, and NIST MEP as a referral partner |
| Restoration | RIA member directory, IICRC Certified Firm Locator (~6,000 firms), TPA vendor networks (Contractor Connection, Alacrity) |
| Construction subs | ABC & AGC chapters, trade-specific associations, state contractor boards |
| Insurance agencies | Big “I” (IIABA), state agent associations |
These already exist for exactly this kind of software, so we’re plugging into a motion, not inventing one:
Before pouring dials into any vertical, it must pass: can they pay (25+ staff / $3M+), do they feel the pain (a real workforce + disconnected tools), big enough list, reachable by phone, and already buys software. Fail two, drop it.
The data play — how we actually find THE niche. Don’t crown a winner in a meeting. Pull a seed list of 2,000–5,000 across two or three Tier-1 verticals, run the callers, and track which vertical, city and script converts. After 2–3 weeks the dials tell us where the money is — pour budget into the winner, cut the rest. My bet is BPOs or staffing lead, but the phones decide, not us. Build the tracking sheet day one: vertical, source, dials, connects, appointments, closes.
Rehman’s instinct is right and the math holds up. Here’s the honest version, the team shape, the money, and the two things that actually decide whether it works.
Rehman’s plan: ~10 callers × 100 dials = 1,000 dials/day. Real numbers say that’s a little conservative, which is good:
Benchmarks: ~28–32% connect rate, ~2.3% dial-to-meeting (6.7% for top reps), 10–20% of demos close. Rehman’s “1 close per 1,000” is a fair, slightly conservative planning number. Early, with green reps and a cold offer, expect closer to 1–3 per week until the script and demo are dialed.
| Role | Job | Pay (1099, commission) |
|---|---|---|
| Cold callers × 5–10 | Dial, gauge interest, book the appointment | $25–75/booked appt, or ~2–5% of the deal |
| Closer × 1–2 | Run the demo, handle objections, close | 10–15% of the deal |
| Fulfillment (cousins) | Onboard, configure, support | Covered by setup fee + retainer |
On a $12K deal, that’s ~$1,500 to the closer and $300–600 to the caller who set it — real money that keeps commission-only reps dialing, which is the whole reason this only works at mid-to-high ticket. At $99/mo it would never pay a human to call.
| Illustrative month (conservative ramp) | Amount |
|---|---|
| Deals closed (say 8 at $10K setup + $800/mo) | $80K setup + $6.4K new MRR |
| Sales commissions (~20% of upfront) | −$16K |
| Dialers + data + numbers (10 seats) | −$2–3.5K |
| Fulfillment (offshore dev, low) | −$4–8K |
| Rough gross left, month one | ~$50K + growing MRR |
Illustrative, not a forecast — real numbers depend entirely on close rate and ramp. The point: even a conservative month clears the costs comfortably, and the MRR + payment rake compound underneath.
1. The list and the script beat dial volume. Cold-calling “want a business system?” to random companies converts like garbage. Cold-calling a targeted list of agencies with “you’re paying for five tools that don’t talk — we replace them with one” converts many times better. Build the agency list, write the pain-first script.
2. The closer is the bottleneck, and Rehman already knows it. High-ticket + a software demo means the closer needs real training and a tight, repeatable demo. This is where Rehman’s CJ network and sales-manager experience is the actual edge — and where the buyer-facing overview doc (the second PDF) becomes the closer’s weapon.
Rehman flagged this and he’s right to. There are two versions, and the second one quietly turns a software company into a payments company — which is worth several times more.
Real Stripe checkout built into the product so agencies can sign up and pay us directly. The mock billing system already scaffolded in the code anticipates this. Required for any self-serve tier, and it makes our own billing clean either way.
Wire Stripe Connect into the invoice module so an agency’s clients can pay their invoices right in the system. Two things happen: the invoicing feature becomes genuinely useful (now it competes with QuickBooks and Stripe Invoicing instead of just generating PDFs), and — the important part — we take a rake, 0.5–1%, on every dollar that flows through.
Why this is the sleeper. An agency processing $100K/month in client invoices through AuxBOS = $500–1,000/month to us, passively, on top of the retainer, and it grows as they grow. This is exactly how Jobber, Housecall Pro and Square make their real money — payments, not software fees. A software business trades at a few times revenue; a payments business trades at far more. Building version B is the single highest-leverage thing on the roadmap after the security fix.
Do both. Version A to get paid; version B because it’s the revenue stream that scales without a single extra sales call.
Two buckets. The first is the strategic calls the three of us make as partners — nothing here moves until we agree on these. The second is the technical answers only the cousins have.