Service Agreements & Plans

A field customer doesn't buy a visit; they buy an outcome over time ("no bugs in the house this year", "a green lawn", "a furnace that works all winter") and the business promises the visits it takes to deliver it. The service agreement is that promise written down: what's covered, how often someone comes, what it costs up front and per period, for how long, and what happens when the problem comes back between visits. Everything operational is generated from it: the schedule, the work orders, the invoices, the reminders. An agreement modeled loosely (a plan name and a price on the account) leaves every other domain guessing.

This chapter covers what's sold and how it's structured: the catalog, the two prices, the term and its renewal, the phases a service moves through, the states of the subscription that results, and the agreements that modify other agreements.

Products, Plans and Add-Ons#

The catalog has three layers:

• Products are units of work: general pest control, mosquito treatment, rodent exclusion, termite monitoring, a lawn application, an AC tune-up. Each product knows how long it takes (initial, standard and rework durations differ), which skills a technician needs to perform it, whether it can be scheduled on its own, and whether it's eligible for free return visits.
• Plans bundle products into what's sold: a basic tier, a mid tier, a premium tier, each with a set of covered products and a service cadence. A plan has exactly one base product that defines it, plus included extras.
• Add-ons are products sold on top of a plan: specialty pests, a seasonal treatment, an extra structure on the property. Each has its own initial and recurring price and can add duration and skills to the visit.

When a visit combines several products, its duration is computed from theirs, either additively (each adds its time) or as the maximum (the work happens in parallel, or the longest dominates), and the product decides which. A visit that needs skills no single technician has can't be scheduled, so the catalog and the skill matrix have to evolve together (Territories & Capacity).

Catalog entries change over time (a price increase, a reformulated product, a retired plan), while agreements signed under the old version stay as they were. That's why the agreement takes a snapshot: at signing it copies the plan's products, prices and service intervals, and the catalog can move on without rewriting anyone's contract.

Two Prices#

Most recurring field services have two prices:

• Initial price: charged once, for the first service. The first visit is the most expensive one to deliver (a full inspection, a heavier treatment, equipment installed, often a longer visit by a more senior technician), and the initial price also recovers some of the cost of the sale.
• Recurring price: charged per period for everything after.

The recurring price is billed on a billing frequency that doesn't have to match the service frequency. A customer serviced every other month can be billed monthly, per visit, quarterly or annually. Keep the two separate in the model; conflating them is how a business ends up unable to offer monthly billing on a quarterly service.

Billing	Bills	Good for	Watch for
Per service	When each visit is completed	Matching money to work; customers who distrust subscriptions	Revenue follows the schedule, including weather and backlog delays
Monthly	On a fixed day each month	Smooth revenue and cash flow	Customers billed in a month with no visit, which needs explaining
Quarterly or annual	Up front for the period	Lower collection cost, prepay discounts	Refunds on cancellation; deferred revenue

Per-service billing is the one generic billing systems handle worst, because the invoice is triggered by an operational event rather than the calendar (Billing Recurring Service).

Prices are also shaped by the sale: a brochure price, a floor below which a rep may not go, discounts, coupons and promotions, all governed by rules (Pricing & Sales Rules). The agreement records the price actually agreed, and why it differs from the brochure, because both commissions and later disputes depend on it.

Term and Renewal#

An agreement has a term: a single service, or a commitment of twelve, eighteen, twenty-four or thirty-six months, for example. Longer terms trade a lower price or a waived initial fee for commitment, and the agreement says what leaving early costs.

At the end of the term most agreements renew automatically, and that's regulated. In the US, ROSCA governs negative-option features in online sales, states have their own automatic-renewal laws on disclosure, consent and cancellation, and an FTC rule meant to make cancellation as easy as sign-up was vacated by a federal appeals court in July 2025 before it took full effect, leaving the federal and state laws that preceded it in force. Consumer Protection covers what they require. For the model, that means:

• The renewal terms are part of the snapshot: whether it renews, for how long, at what price.
• Renewal is an event, not a silent date change: it's recorded, can trigger a required notice ahead of time, and can be stopped by the customer.
• Cancellation is a request with a date: a customer may cancel effective immediately, at the end of the current period or at the end of the term, and the agreement records when it will end (cancel_at) as well as when it did (cancelled_at).

Phases of Service#

Not every agreement is a cadence of identical visits. Many are a sequence of phases, each with its own kind of work:

Phase	What happens	Appointments
Signing	The agreement is accepted, payment captured or authorized	None, or a sales visit
Inspection	Someone assesses the property and confirms the scope and price	One
Installation	Equipment goes in: bait stations, a system, a unit	One or more, sometimes by a crew
Initial service	The first full treatment or service	One
Recurring service	Visits on the cadence	Many
Reservice	Free return visits when the problem comes back	As needed
Deinstallation	Equipment comes out at the end	One
End of life	The agreement is closed, records retained	None

A plan says which phase it enters at (a general pest plan goes straight to the initial service; a termite system starts at inspection) and how many appointments each phase may have. Each appointment carries work orders, one per product being delivered, and a work order has its own due range and status. Work orders are what actually get scheduled and completed; appointments are the containers that put them on a route. That split lets a visit deliver two products, lets one product's work be deferred to the next visit when the technician runs out of time, and lets a cancelled appointment release its work orders back to the backlog instead of losing them (Booking Appointments).

The Subscription's State#

The agreement is the contract; the subscription is its running instance, and its state decides what the rest of the system does. Billing owns the state, and every other domain reads it:

State	Service scheduled	Billed	Meaning
pending	The initial service only	Not yet	Signed, first visit not done
active	Yes	Yes	Normal
past_due	Yes	Retrying	A payment failed and is being retried
frozen	No; future visits cancelled	Paused	An unresolved balance stopped service, without ending the agreement
cancelled	No	Remaining balance only	Ended

Frozen deserves its own state rather than a flag on another. It's how a business stops serving a customer who isn't paying without terminating the contract, which matters for both collections (the balance is still owed under the agreement) and retention (paying the balance unfreezes it, and the schedule resumes). Freezing cancels future appointments with a reason the schedule and the customer can see, and pausing collection should mean the frozen period isn't billed later as one large catch-up invoice. Collections & Retention covers when to freeze.

A pending cancellation is separate again: a subscription with a cancel_at date is still active until then, but it shouldn't get new visits scheduled past that date. So "can we schedule this customer?" is a derived answer: the status is one of pending, active or past due (a business may include unpaid), and it isn't frozen, and any cancel_at is after the visit. Compute that in one place, because every domain will need it and each will otherwise get it slightly wrong.

Reservices#

A reservice (a callback, a retreat) is a free visit between scheduled ones, when the problem the customer is paying to prevent comes back. It's the guarantee that makes a recurring plan worth buying, and it has rules:

• Eligibility. The previous visit was completed, the product is reserviceable, the subscription is active, and no other reservice is already pending.
• A window. A reservice is tied to the last completed visit and has to happen within a set number of days of it; after that, the next regular visit is the answer. My default is a window of a month and a half, long enough for the customer to notice the problem, short enough that it's clearly about the last treatment.
• No bill, no cadence change. A reservice doesn't invoice, and the next regular visit is still counted from the last regular one, so customers who call often don't push their schedule around.
• Its own duration. Rework is usually shorter than a full service and may need a different skill.

Track reservices per customer and per technician. A customer with a reservice after every visit has a problem the plan isn't solving; a technician whose customers all call back has a training need.

Upgrades and Upsells#

Customers change plans. An upgrade moves them to a higher tier; an upsell adds a product or add-on to what they have. Both are sales, often made by the technician on site, and both are commissioned (Sales Teams & Commissions).

Model an upgrade as a new agreement linked to the original, not an edit of the old one:

• The new agreement has its own snapshot, price and signature, and its own cancellation rights.
• The original is ended when the new one takes over, with the link (original_subscription_id or similar) kept in both directions.
• Billing carries the original billing anchor over, so the customer's bill date doesn't jump.
• Anything that applies to the account through the old agreement (a freeze, an open balance) carries over or blocks the change explicitly.

Editing in place loses the record of what the customer had agreed to before, which is the first thing anyone asks for when a customer disputes a price increase. It also makes commission attribution impossible, since the commission is for the difference.

One-Time Services#

A single service (a one-off treatment, a move-out clean, a repair) uses the same model with a degenerate term: one phase, one appointment, no renewal. Billing creates the invoice at completion and the subscription ends after it. Keeping one-time services in the agreement model rather than as ad hoc jobs means they get the same scheduling, proof of service and billing as everything else, and a one-time customer who converts to a recurring plan is an upgrade like any other.

Warranties and Long-Term Agreements#

Some agreements are mostly a promise. Termite agreements are the classic case: an inspection, an installation or a liquid treatment, then years of annual inspections or monitoring, backed by a warranty to retreat (and sometimes to repair damage) if termites return. These agreements often run for many years, renew annually for an inspection fee, and transfer with the house when it's sold.

They're regulated more tightly than routine service. Florida, for example, requires any contract for treating wood-destroying organisms to state on its first page, in bold, whether it covers repair and retreatment, retreatment only, or carries no warranty at all, and forbids calling a guarantee "full" or "unlimited" if it has exclusions. Other states have their own rules, so templates are selected by state (Signing the Agreement).

For the model:

• Warranty terms (what's covered, exclusions, the annual condition such as an inspection or renewal payment) are part of the snapshot.
• Coverage has dates, and a lapsed renewal ends the warranty even if the record of past work lives on.
• Installed equipment is tracked per property: what's in the ground, where, when it was last checked, often with the manufacturer's own system for monitoring stations.
• Transfers move the agreement to a new account (the buyer) at the same property, with the history intact.

What This Means for the System You Build#

• A catalog of products, plans and add-ons, with durations, skills and reservice eligibility on the product.
• A snapshot at signing of products, prices, intervals and renewal terms, so catalog changes never rewrite contracts.
• Initial and recurring prices, and billing frequency separate from service frequency.
• Renewal as a recorded event, and cancellation with both cancel_at and cancelled_at.
• Phases and work orders, so installs, initials, recurring visits and reservices share one model.
• Subscription state owned by billing, with frozen as its own state and "can we schedule this?" computed in one place.
• Reservices with eligibility and a window, never billed and never moving the cadence.
• Upgrades as new agreements linked to the original, keeping the billing anchor.
• Warranty terms, coverage dates, installed equipment and transfers for long-term agreements.

References#

Specifications

• Florida Statutes 482.227: Guarantees and warranties, first-page disclosure of repair and retreatment, retreatment only, or no warranty, and the limit on "full" or "unlimited"
• 15 U.S.C. § 8403: Negative option marketing on the Internet, ROSCA's disclosure, express informed consent and simple cancellation for online negative-option sales

Reference

• Latham & Watkins: Eighth Circuit Vacates FTC Click-to-Cancel Rule, the July 2025 decision vacating the negative option rule before enforcement