What Buildxact costs in NZ dollars, what the price buys, and the Australian defaults we found in a trial. Dated and sourced, with what CostMate does instead.
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Buildxact is the closest rival to CostMate in spirit, because estimating is its front door. Builders who look for an alternative tend to say one of two things: it costs more than they expected, or it feels like it was made for Australia. Both are partly fair, and one of them has a catch in its favour. Here is what we found, with dates.
Buildxact has three plans in New Zealand dollars a month, excluding GST: Foundation at $199, Pro at $399 and Master at $599. All three allow unlimited users. Annual billing is about 15 percent cheaper, and there is a 14-day free trial. Checked 30 September 2026 and again on its own subscribe page on 9 October 2026.
Foundation covers estimating, quote letters, digital signatures and purchase orders. Job management, the schedule, the Onsite phone app and the client portal start at Pro, so the price for running jobs in it starts at $399. Its AI tools are paid add-ons on the lower plans: the Estimate Generator is $99 on Foundation, and the Estimate Reviewer is $149.
It depends on the size of your crew. One flat price with unlimited users can work out well for a bigger team, where per-user tools add up. For a builder, solo or with a team of up to 50, who mostly needs to price jobs, it is a lot more than the alternatives.
CostMate has a free plan with one estimate a month, and Solo is $49 a month with no GST added, because CostMate is not GST registered. Solo is per business and includes up to two crew logins. Business is $99 a month for the whole business, for an office login or a bigger crew, with no charge per person.
The price list is New Zealand, and its supplier links include Mitre 10 NZ. But in our trial on 9 October 2026 a lot of the defaults were Australian. The AI estimate for an Auckland deck included termite protection pile caps, which are an Australian item. The forms had a State field. A job schedule template was written for an Australian new house, with steps such as House Slab and Termite Treatment. On a deck job, the progress-claim stages were new-home stages.
Nothing there is a bug in the usual sense, and you can edit all of it. It just means a New Zealand builder has to catch these before they reach a client. It is also worth checking its supplier links for the merchants you actually use: on the first screen we saw several ITM stores and Bunnings, but no PlaceMakers or Carters.
CostMate is built only for NZ residential building work. You choose a job type and fill in the job, and it works out the materials with quantities and the labour in hours by phase, priced from Dayle ITM and PlaceMakers trade pricing. A rules engine does the maths, so the same job entered twice gives the same numbers, and it writes assumptions and exclusions you can edit. The client can accept the quote on a link, and once you win the job it carries on with variations, hours, receipts, deposits and progress claims. Building Code points such as E2, F4 and B1 are flagged for you to confirm.
Buildxact has a schedule, a client portal and more of the job-running side on its Pro plan. CostMate does not have a crew calendar or full invoicing beyond deposits and progress claims. It puts your job's stages on dates, and with Xero connected it sends draft bills and invoices to your own Xero for you to approve there.
Buildxact's prices are from buildxact.com/nz/pricing, checked 15 October 2026, and from the subscribe page of our own trial account on 9 October 2026. The Australian defaults are what we saw on that one account and Buildxact may have changed them since. What CostMate does is true of a brand-new account today.
Check Buildxact's own pricing page before you decide, and look at every default on a trial before you rely on it.