Is there free plumbing dispatch software?

Process: Dispatch and routing. Trade: Plumber. Reviewed 2026-10-07.

Short answerFree plans can collect plumbing requests and hold a calendar, but live dispatch needs more: seeing which plumber is free, sending an arrival text and reordering the day for an emergency. Square Appointments lists $0 per location and Setmore advertises a free plan, though both are appointment tools ^[1]^[2].

The explanation

Plumbing dispatch is dynamic. A burst pipe at nine pushes every later job back, and the office must decide who goes, who is rescheduled and who is told. A static appointment list cannot show which plumber is nearest or free.

Free appointment tools cover the booking half. Square Appointments lists staff calendars with no employee limit ^[1], and Setmore lists SMS reminders on a paid tier from $5 per user per month ^[2]. Neither lists a dispatch map or an on-my-way text.

Test with an emergency drill. Take a normal day of five jobs, insert a same-day emergency, and move the affected jobs. Count the clicks and the calls you still need to make. If most of the work still happens by phone, the tool is a calendar, not dispatch.

Steps

Load a normal day of five jobs across two plumbers.
Insert a same-day emergency and reassign affected jobs.
Check that each customer can be told about the change.
Count calls you still had to make by hand.

What to watch for

No view of which plumber is free right now.
Reschedules that cannot notify the affected customers.

In plumber

Plumbing mixes planned installs with emergencies, so the board must let a dispatcher reassign a plumber fast and tell the displaced customers. All plumber scheduling questions.

How Apex does it

In progress

Part of this is built. The rest is not. Status as of 2026-10-07; the badge shows the least-built feature involved.

Apex lists reassigning a job with automatic notices and emergency or after-hours dispatch tiers, each with its own status badge. There is no free tier; a 14-day free trial needs no card, then $59 a month for one user.

SC44Reassign job with automatic notices(Rolling out)
SC21Emergency / after-hours dispatch tiers(In progress)

Apex Flow Scheduler is in early access. See how we label status.

Sources

Square Appointments pricing page (read 2026-10-07)
Setmore pricing page (read 2026-10-07)

Where this question comes from: owners type it, or a close variant, into search boxes. It was returned by public search suggestions (Google, Bing or DuckDuckGo) when we collected them on 2026-10-06; the exact phrase seen was “plumbing dispatch software free”. We do not have search volumes.