ClaimStack vs Payapps: A Payapps Alternative with Free Access for Invited Subcontractors

If you're running progress claims between you and your subcontractors, Payapps is probably on your shortlist. It's a well-established product with a real track record, and a lot of good builders use it. This isn't a hit piece.

But there's one aspect of the pricing model that can be easy to miss when a builder is evaluating the platform. It's not hidden; it's published on Payapps' own website. It's just easy to skip past.

So let's put it on the table, quote it exactly, and let you decide.

Payapps is a trademark of its owner. This comparison is based on publicly available information and our own product. We are not affiliated with Payapps.

The short version

• On Payapps' published pricing, subcontractors are on paid plans, described as applying whether the platform is used with builder clients or on a self-managed basis.
• Payapps advertises a free monthly claim, but on their published wording it's scoped to "self-managed" contracts. That one word is doing a lot of work, and we pull it apart below.
• On ClaimStack, anyone invited into a project claims free, on our Collaborator plan, with no seat limits. The party running the projects is the only one who pays.
• Payapps publishes subcontractor pricing in full, but publishes no dollar figure for head contractors — that's a custom quote. Ours is on the website, both sides of the contract.
• Both platforms do claims and variations. ClaimStack additionally runs the variation lifecycle as a single shared record with a version chain and database-level immutability once approved.
• And — the part most builders don't expect from a claims tool — ClaimStack also runs your claim upstream to the principal, not just the ones coming at you from below.

Everything described in this article is in our Claims plan at $70 per seat per month. Where something needs our larger Commercial OS plan, we say so at the point we mention it, rather than letting you find out on a sales call.

How we checked this: we reviewed Payapps' public pricing, main contractor, subcontractor and help centre pages on 16 July 2026, and every quote below links to the page it came from. We're reading their public documentation, not their billing system. Prices and features change — verify before relying on any of it.

What Payapps charges a subcontractor

From Payapps' subcontractor pricing page, in Australian dollars, excluding GST:

To be fair to Payapps: every plan includes unlimited users, and they state "monthly plans and no lock in contracts or additional fees – ever." Those are real advantages and we're not going to pretend otherwise.

Now the sentence that matters. From Payapps' own subcontractors page:

"Plans are based on the number of contracts you claim against, whether you are using Payapps with your builder clients, or to self-manage payment claims."

Read that clause again: whether you are using Payapps with your builder clients. On the published wording, being invited by a builder does not appear to exempt the subcontractor from Payapps' subcontractor pricing — the plans are described as applying whether the platform is used with builder clients or on a self-managed basis.

The same page describes the onboarding plainly:

"You'll receive an email invitation to join your client's contract within Payapps. You'll be prompted to sign up and make your first claim."

That's the published onboarding path. An invited subcontractor receives a prompt to create an account, and Payapps' published pricing says its plans apply whether the platform is used with builder clients or on a self-managed basis.

The asterisk

Payapps' pricing page says:

"And your first claim across your self-managed contracts is FREE every month."

At a glance that reads like "everyone gets a free claim." The word doing the work is self-managed.

In Payapps' help centre, a self-managed contract is one the subcontractor creates and self-assesses themselves — the documented path for when your client isn't running the contract in Payapps. Their guidance is explicit that if your client is also on Payapps, you don't create the project at all; you wait for their invitation. So on the published wording, the free monthly claim is scoped to the contracts your client isn't on the platform for — not to the invited contract your builder just told you is mandatory.

We're reading their public documentation, not their billing system. If you're evaluating Payapps, ask them directly: "On a contract my builder invites me to, what do I pay to submit a claim?" It's a fair question with a short answer, and you should get it in writing from them rather than take our word for it.

What ClaimStack charges a subcontractor

Nothing.

Our Collaborator plan is free, for anyone invited into a project. It includes:

• Submit and assess payment claims
• Submit and review variations
• View documents and correspondence
• Respond to tenders
• Built-in e-signatures
• No seat limits

There's no per-claim fee, no contract cap, and no "first one's free" qualifier to read twice. If you've been invited into a project on ClaimStack, you claim. That's it.

The party who runs the projects pays. Claims is $70 per seat per month, from $61.25 on annual billing — $735 a year for one seat, in AUD excluding GST. No seat minimum; buy one if one is all you need. Your principal, your subcontractors and your consultants all come on free.

This is a deliberate choice, and it's worth being blunt about why. Requiring invited subcontractors to purchase a plan can create an additional barrier to consistent adoption — you can end up running one system for the parties who signed up and email for the ones who didn't, which is worse than committing to a single system. Adoption is the whole product. Putting a paywall in front of the people you need to adopt it works against that.

Notice who gets a price list, and who gets a phone call

Here's something you only see when you put Payapps' two pricing pages side by side.

Subcontractor pricing is published to the dollar. Six plans, $49 to $440, right there on the website. The table above is theirs, copied straight off the page. A subbie can find out exactly what they'll pay in about eight seconds, without talking to anyone.

Head contractor pricing isn't published at all. Their main contractor pricing page lists a single option — "CUSTOM PLAN" — with no figures on it. What it says is:

"Payapps offers pricing based on the number of projects and payment claims you assess and approve on a monthly basis. A fixed annual fee gives you certainty, and you can add users at no extra cost."

So head contractors are priced on volume too — projects and claims per month. You just can't find out the rate. To learn what you'd pay, you request a demo and have the conversation.

The result is an unusual transparency difference: a subcontractor can see the standard published price immediately, while a main contractor needs to request a tailored quote.

We're not going to speculate about why; we don't know, and a custom annual fee is a common enough way to sell to larger accounts. But we'll say what it costs you as a buyer. You can't benchmark it. You can't budget for it before you're in a sales process. And you can't compare it against us, or against anyone else, without booking a meeting first.

What we publish

All of it. Both sides of the contract, same page, no meeting required:

Claims is exactly half of Commercial OS, and it stays half at every seat count and on both billing cycles. Nothing to work out.

The volume discounts are published too, and they apply to every seat once you cross the band:

Annual billing takes a further 12.5% off all of it, which brings a Claims seat to $61.25 a month — $735 for the year — or $49 a month at fifty seats and up. There's no seat minimum: if you want one seat, buy one seat. Every one-off fee is listed on the same page too.

You can work out your exact number right now, in about a minute, and never speak to us until you actually want to.

In fairness, we do quote Enterprise custom — multi-entity groups with SSO and integration work genuinely vary. But that's the top of our range, not the default path for a head contractor. If you run projects and want claims, the price is $70 a seat and you didn't need to ask.

Our view is simple: if pricing requires a sales conversation, buyers can't independently compare the final amount before entering that process.

The honest caveat on seats

Here's where the comparison cuts against us, so we'll say it ourselves.

ClaimStack Claims is priced per seat. Payapps' subcontractor plans include unlimited users, and their main contractor page states you "can add users at no extra cost" on a custom fixed annual fee.

So if you're a large head contractor putting twenty commercial staff on the platform, Payapps' unlimited-user model may well come in cheaper on your own seats than ours. We do volume discounts, but we're not going to claim we always win on price. We don't.

What we'd say is this: your seat count is a number you control. Your subcontractor count isn't. The cost that actually bites — and the one that decides whether the platform gets used — sits with the people you're inviting.

And we can't compare head-contractor pricing directly, because theirs isn't published. Get both quotes.

Variations: how ClaimStack's shared-record model works

This is the part we care most about, and it's where the difference stops being about price.

Rather than attempting to infer Payapps' underlying architecture, here is the design ClaimStack uses. In ClaimStack a variation is one shared record with a locked history — not a copy on your side and a copy on theirs, with the reconciliation left until the end of the month.

Here's what that means concretely. All of this is in the Claims plan.

One record, both parties. A variation isn't your copy and their copy. It's one row, and both sides of the contract read the same one — enforced at the database with row-level security, not by hoping two systems stay in sync. When your subbie's status says approved, yours says approved, because it's the same field.

Revisions supersede, they don't duplicate. When a variation is revised, ClaimStack creates a new version linked to its parent by a version chain and marks the previous one superseded. Registers and claims resolve to the latest revision only — so your subbie can revise their variation four times without your register turning into four near-identical lines you have to reconcile. Every earlier revision stays readable. Nothing is overwritten and nothing is lost.

Approved means locked — and we enforce it at the database. Once a variation is approved, assessed, rejected or superseded, its title, description, submitted amount, assessed amount and clause reference cannot be changed. Not "shouldn't be." Can't. There's a trigger in the database that rejects the write. It doesn't matter what the interface allows or what an integration tries — the record is frozen at the layer where it's stored.

That's the bit that matters at 11pm on a Tuesday eighteen months from now, when a final account is in dispute and someone asks what Variation 47 said when it was approved. On a spreadsheet, that's an argument. Here it's a lookup.

You can't approve your own variation. If your company submitted it, you cannot assess it — our API blocks self-approval outright, and approve/assess is restricted to the responding party on the contract. There's no "who moved this to approved?" mystery, because the one party that can't is the one that raised it.

Internal approval before it leaves your office. You can require variations to clear your own review chain — multi-level, with dollar thresholds and named or role-based approvers — before the other party ever sees them. Configurable per project.

Then they carry into the claim. Eligible variations surface directly in the claim creator with their breakdown, so nothing gets re-keyed off a register. You select what you're claiming; on submission the values are snapshotted immutably against the claim. The claim shows what the variation said at the time it was claimed, permanently, even if the variation moves on afterwards.

To be straight with you about scope: this is a shared source of truth, not a live-updating one. There's no websocket pushing changes onto your screen the instant the other party clicks. Both parties read the same record, and transitions trigger notifications. That's what we do and that's all we're claiming.

Oh — and your head contract claim

Everything above is the downstream story: claims and variations between you and your subbies. That's the job Payapps is built for, and the job we've been comparing.

Now the part that tends to reframe the whole evaluation.

You don't only receive claims. You issue one. Every month you're also claiming upstream — to the principal, the developer, the client — and that claim is usually the single most financially consequential document your business produces. It's typically also the one being assembled by hand, in Excel, from the same data you just processed downstream.

ClaimStack runs that one too, on the same $70 Claims plan:

• Head contract payment claims, composed against your contract breakdown line by line, with previously-claimed amounts carried forward automatically so the totals always reconcile.
• Head contract variations, with the same shared register, version chain, immutability and self-approval controls described above — upstream to your principal, not just downstream to your subs. Consultant contracts too.
• Payment schedules and assessments on the claims coming at you, with the statutory clock tracked from the date of service.

(Linking a head contract variation to the purchase orders underneath it needs Commercial OS at $140, since that's where POs and supplier management live. Subcontract and consultant variation links are in Claims.)

Payapps' main contractor page describes its role as approving subcontractor payment claims — "Payapps simplifies and streamlines the process to approve subcontractor payment claims." On their published materials we found no head-contract claim capability described as a standard capability. It's possible they offer it in some markets or under custom arrangements; we're describing what's publicly documented for their main contractor product in Australia as at 16 July 2026. We're telling you what they advertise, not what their roadmap holds — ask them.

But it's the reason the comparison isn't quite apples to apples. If you adopt a downstream-only claims tool, your upstream claim stays in Excel — which means your most important claim of the month is the one with the fewest controls on it.

So which should you use?

If you're time-poor, here's the whole article in one step: get Payapps' written quote for what your subbies pay on invited contracts, plug your seat count into our pricing table above, and compare the two totals before you book a single demo.

Otherwise — genuinely, it depends.

Payapps may suit you better if: you want a mature, focused tool for subcontractor progress claims only, you have a large in-house team and their unlimited-user model beats our per-seat pricing on your numbers, and your subcontractors are already on it and paying without friction.

ClaimStack is likely the better fit if: you don't want to mandate a platform your subbies have to buy, you want variations run as a locked shared record rather than a shared table, or you want your head contract claim living in the same system as the subcontract claims feeding it.

And if you're already on Payapps and your subbies are happily paying, there's no obligation to switch. This is written for teams evaluating their next contract, or unhappy with how their current setup is working.

We'd rather you pick the right tool than oversell you ours. If you're weighing it up: get Payapps' head-contractor quote, ask them in writing what your subbies pay on invited contracts, and then talk to us with real numbers in hand.

See how it works →

Frequently asked questions

Do subcontractors pay to use Payapps?

On Payapps' published pricing, yes. Their subcontractor plans range from $65 per claim on Pay as you go up to $440 per month for Ultimate (AUD, excluding GST), and their subcontractors page states plans are based on the number of contracts you claim against "whether you are using Payapps with your builder clients, or to self-manage payment claims." Payapps advertises a free first claim each month, but its published wording scopes that to self-managed contracts. Confirm current pricing directly with Payapps.

Do subcontractors pay to use ClaimStack?

No. Anyone invited into a ClaimStack project uses the Collaborator plan, which is free with no seat limits, and can submit claims, submit and review variations, view documents and correspondence, respond to tenders and sign electronically. Only the party running the projects needs a paid plan.

What is a "self-managed" contract in Payapps?

Per Payapps' help centre, a self-managed contract is one a subcontractor creates and self-assesses themselves — the documented workflow for when your client isn't running the contract in Payapps. If your client is a Payapps customer, their guidance is that you're invited to the contract instead of creating it.

How much does Payapps cost for main contractors?

Payapps doesn't publish head contractor pricing. Their main contractor pricing page lists a single "CUSTOM PLAN" and states pricing is "based on the number of projects and payment claims you assess and approve on a monthly basis" as a fixed annual fee with users included at no extra cost, but no figures are given — you request a demo to find out. Their subcontractor pricing, by contrast, is published in full. ClaimStack publishes both sides: Collaborator is free, Claims is $70 per seat per month and Commercial OS is $140, with no seat minimum, volume discounts of 10% at 10 seats, 15% at 25 and 20% at 50+, plus 12.5% off for annual billing.

Is ClaimStack cheaper than Payapps?

Based on Payapps' standard published Australian pricing, ClaimStack is cheaper for an invited subcontractor: ClaimStack's Collaborator plan is free, while Payapps publishes paid subcontractor plans. Commercial arrangements may vary, so confirm pricing directly with Payapps. For your own team it depends on seat count: ClaimStack Claims is $70 per seat per month, or $61.25 on annual billing ($735 a year per seat, AUD ex GST), dropping to $63 at 10 seats, $59.50 at 25 and $56 at 50+, with no seat minimum. Payapps includes unlimited users on its plans and quotes head contractors a custom fixed annual fee that isn't published, so get both quotes.

Can ClaimStack handle head contract claims to the principal?

Yes, on the Claims plan at $70 per seat per month. ClaimStack runs head contract payment claims, variations and payment schedules upstream to the principal, as well as subcontract and consultant claims downstream — in one system, with variations linked across both directions.

Can a variation be edited after it's approved in ClaimStack?

No. Once a variation is approved, assessed, rejected or superseded, its title, description, submitted amount, assessed amount and clause are locked by a database trigger — the write is rejected at the storage layer, not just hidden in the interface. Revisions create a new linked version and supersede the previous one, so the full history stays intact and auditable.

Sources

Don't take our word for any of it. Every Payapps figure and quotation above comes from these pages, reviewed on 16 July 2026:

• Payapps subcontractor pricing — the plan table, "unlimited users", and the "first claim across your self-managed contracts is FREE every month" wording
• Payapps for subcontractors — "Plans are based on the number of contracts you claim against, whether you are using Payapps with your builder clients, or to self-manage payment claims", and the email-invitation onboarding
• Payapps main contractor pricing — the custom plan and fixed annual fee
• Payapps for main contractors — how they describe the product's role
• Payapps help centre — the self-managed contract workflow
• ClaimStack pricing — every figure we've quoted for our own plans

Payapps is a trademark of its owner; this comparison is published for the purpose of comparative information and we make no claim of affiliation. Pricing and features change — verify both with Payapps and with us before making a decision.

Want to see the variation register and a head contract claim running side by side? Read about pricing →