Switching from Syncta
What each costs
| Syncta (currency not stated) | BackflowFiled (USD) | |
|---|---|---|
| Entry | $25/month minimum, first 5 tests free, then $4.95 per test | US$39/month founding, US$69 after — up to 500 devices, unlimited tests |
| A firm running 600 tests a year | $25 × 12 + 595 × $4.95 = $3,245.25 | US$1,788 at the founding price, US$2,748 after the first 50 |
| Unlimited | $549/month | US$449/month, up to 10,000 devices |
Syncta plan details as published in their own help centre at help.syncta.com/en/articles/2842141-syncta-s-plans, read 20 September 2026. Check their site for current plans — we would rather you verified this than took our word for it. Their article states no currency, and their main site publishes no prices at all. Ours are Canadian dollars. Syncta is a Massachusetts company owned by Watts, so theirs are most likely US dollars — we could not confirm it, so we have not converted. If they are USD, their cost to a Canadian buyer is higher than shown here and the difference is larger than this table suggests, not smaller.
A note on how to read that last row. Syncta also sells a per-tester plan at $99 a tester a month, but a firm with several testers would take Unlimited instead — so the honest comparison is against $549, their cheapest plan for that firm, not against a headcount multiplied by $99. Ours is US$449 for up to 10,000 devices, or US$229 under 2,500 — and neither charges per tester.
What it takes to start
This is the difference that matters more than the money.
Syncta's free trial asks for: company name, company address, email, primary contact name, phone, your backflow certification number, your certification issuing authority, and the number of assemblies you monitor. Then, in their own words, only verified users receive the sign-up link, and to allow up to 48 hours for verification.
Ours: sign in with Google or an email link. No card. File a real report in the next ten minutes, free, and keep the PDF whether or not you ever pay us.
Where Syncta is better
They have been doing this for years, they are owned by Watts, and they support far more water authorities than we do — we support one. If your authority is not the Capital Regional District, they are the safer choice today, and we would rather tell you that than let you find out after signing up.
They also ship a lot we do not. Read off their own tester page in September 2026:
- Invoicing and work orders — we produce the report and you invoice somewhere else.
- Scheduling with routing, and a map with your customers and devices on it.
- A customer portal.
- Data analytics, and automatic checking that results fall in acceptable ranges.
- A training hub.
- A library of thousands of backflow test report forms — their words.
Invoicing is the one we think matters most and it is the one we are building next. The rest is a real list and we are not going to pretend otherwise.
On the forms: a form is not a jurisdiction. Thousands of forms is a real asset and more than we have. What we do instead is encode the rules behind one, with the citation attached — how often, by when, whose legal duty it is, and the Capital Regional District's split where a pass goes by email and a failure goes to the portal within 14 days. That is a narrower claim than “we did the jurisdiction work and nobody else did”, which would not be true.
One thing worth knowing about who owns it
Syncta is owned by Watts Water Technologies — which also owns Febco, Ames and Backflow Direct, so the software, the valves and the assemblies are one company. Their own site footer reads “© 2024 Watts”, and the terms of service linked from it resolve to watts.com — terms written for smart water valves, discussing leak detection, battery replacement and emergency dispatch. The words “backflow” and “test report” do not appear in them.
That is an observation about a document, not an accusation. Read it yourself and decide what it means for you; we are a small independent company and our terms are about this product.
Where we think we are better
- We publish our prices. Theirs are in a help-centre article, not on their pricing page.
- You can try it without asking permission. No certification number, no two-day wait.
- Every report is publicly verifiable. Each one carries a code anyone can check — a property manager, an insurer, the authority. We went through Syncta's own published material and did not find an equivalent, and we could not establish either way for SwiftComply. That is what we checked, not a claim about the whole market. If you find one, tell us and we will correct this.
- The form is checked field by field against the authority's own PDF, not approximated. Look at it.
If you do switch
Send us a Syncta export or a spreadsheet and we load it for you. You do not have to move your customer list by hand, and you do not have to move it at all — you can add sites as you test them.