Birdeye review (2026): pricing, features and who it's for

The contract terms deserve a read before the demo

Deals are reported to run 12 months and renew themselves. The reported cancellation window is 90 days of written notice before the term ends. On a normal year that means your decision point is month nine, not month twelve, and it is a decision you have to remember to make.

One owner posted the fine print out of their own agreement after trying to leave.

That account also carries the uplift. The renewal came back 8 percent higher. Take $299 a month, $3,588 for the year, and an 8 percent bump puts year two at roughly $3,875 before any modules. Whatever number you are quoted, ask two questions in writing: what is the notice period, and what is the renewal increase called and capped at.

The free trial does not get you around this. There is a 30-day free trial of the Reviews tool with no card needed, which is a genuine way to see the review engine work. The full platform still runs through a demo and a quote.

What a one-location shop pays in year one

Location is the unit, and one truck plus one office counts as one location. So the reported entry rung, about $299 a month billed annually, is the one most trade shops face. That is $3,588 for the year.

Onboarding is reported at $500 to $1,500 per location, paid before you send your first review request. Add-on modules like surveys, referrals and mass texting are reported at $50 to $150 a month each, and texts carry per-message fees. Two modules at $100 puts you $2,400 higher over a year.

So a realistic first year, with setup and no modules, is roughly $4,100 to $5,100. With a couple of modules it clears $6,000. None of that is hidden exactly, but none of it is published either, and the number in the demo is usually the monthly one.

One owner shopping the category put the spend in the same range that the reported ladder suggests, which is the closest thing to a public price check we have.

It puts the reviews on your own website

This is the feature that separates Birdeye from Podium at a similar price. Birdeye gives you review widgets: a live review feed, a rating badge, review-us buttons, embedded on your own site by pasting in a snippet of code or an iFrame. Your web person will know what to do with it in ten minutes.

Why it matters: a homeowner comparing three HVAC companies is on your service page, not on your Google listing. Stars on that page do work that stars on Google cannot. Podium does not offer this at all. NiceJob does, at a fifth of the price.

The rest of the review machinery is complete. The review request agent asks customers automatically and tests the timing and the platform. Monitoring watches more than 200 review sites and alerts you by email and text when one lands. Replies come from one dashboard with templates and rules, and an AI agent will write the response and either post it or hold it for your approval.

Two things that go wrong after you sign

Two things drive the unhappy reports. The first is setup that does not land. Birdeye is not self-serve; onboarding runs through their team, and when it goes wrong you are paying monthly for a system that is not sending anything.

The second is expectations about volume. Review tools do not make customers write reviews. They ask, they remind, and the response rate belongs to your customer base and your service. One owner reported about one review a month over nine and a half months. Another, in a field where customers do not want to be publicly associated with the service, sent requests out and got almost nothing back.

Trades are a better fit than either of those examples. A homeowner who just got heat back in January will leave a review. But go in with a number in mind. If you close 60 jobs a month and 10 percent leave a review, that is six a month. At $299 that is about $50 a review, and you should decide now whether that is a good trade for you.

It connects to the field software you already run

The link to your job software is what makes any of this automatic. Birdeye connects to Jobber, Housecall Pro and ServiceTitan directly, and its integration library also lists FieldEdge and Service Fusion.

The ServiceTitan link fires on a Job Completed trigger, adding the customer into Birdeye when you mark the job complete. Housecall Pro sends the request after a transaction is finished and alerts you about each incoming review by email and text.

That Jobber connection is worth calling out, because Podium at a similar price does not have one. If you run Jobber and you are choosing between the two big reputation platforms on price alone, the integration list should break the tie.

Who should sign, and who should walk

Sign if you are a multi-location operation, or a single location doing enough volume that reputation and local listings are a marketing line item rather than a chore. If you are already paying an agency $1,000 a month to manage listings, social and reviews, bringing that in house here can be the cheaper answer. Use the 30-day Reviews trial first, and get the notice period and the renewal uplift in writing before anything is signed.

Walk away if you are one truck and one van and what you want is more Google reviews. The gap between $75 a month with no contract and $299 a month on a 12-month term with a 90-day exit window is too wide to justify on the review feature alone. Walk away too if your cash flow cannot absorb a $500 to $1,500 setup fee up front, or if you are the kind of owner who will forget to diary a cancellation date nine months out. That last one is not a joke. It is the single most common thing owners regret here.

What owners actually say