ServiceTitan pricebook not showing in mobile, or showing $0? Two different problems
Two different problems hide under the same complaint. One is that the book is invisible in the field: a tech opens the pricebook on the tablet and the items are not there. The other is that the items are there but every price reads $0. People describe both as “the pricebook is broken in mobile,” and then chase the wrong fix. They are not the same problem and they do not share a cause. Here is how to tell which one you have, and the exact fix for each.
Problem 1: the items are not showing at all
An item exists in the book but does not appear on the tech’s device. Almost always it is one of five things, and they are worth checking in this order.
No category assigned. Services and equipment only show in mobile if they sit in a category or subcategory. An item with a blank Category is invisible to techs. Materials show either way, which is exactly why this is confusing: some things appear and some do not, so it does not look like a settings problem. Assign the category and it shows.
The category has Hide In Mobile checked. There is a Hide In Mobile column on categories. One checkmark hides the entire category and everything in it from the field, while it still looks perfectly normal on desktop. It is easy to set by accident and hard to notice.
The category is inactive. An inactive category takes its items down with it in mobile. This bites people who deactivate a category to tidy up and do not realize live items went dark with it.
The Business Unit does not match. This is the one nobody checks. If the technician has no Business Unit assigned, or the category does not have that technician’s Business Unit added to it, the items will not show for that tech even though the category is active and visible. It looks like a pricebook bug. It is a scoping mismatch between the tech and the category, and it is the reason “I assigned the category and it still is not there” happens.
The device has not synced. The change is live on desktop and the truck is holding yesterday’s book. The tech has to pull it down again (Sync, then Download Pricebook and Sync changes).
If the book is invisible in the field, it is almost never the pricebook itself. It is one of those five, and you can walk all five in about five minutes.
Problem 2: the price shows $0
The tech sees the item, but the price reads $0. Same symptom, three genuinely different causes.
It is dynamic pricing, and that is expected. ServiceTitan Mobile shows static prices only. A dynamic-priced item has no stored price to show, so it reads $0 in the mobile catalog and then prices correctly the moment it lands on an estimate, where the price is calculated from cost and your markup rule. The tell is simple: the estimate is right, and only the catalog list shows $0. Most $0-in-mobile panic is this, and nothing is wrong. The dynamic pricing guide covers how that calculation works.
The item genuinely has a $0 cost. This is a real problem wearing the same mask. Dynamic pricing needs a cost to compute from. If a material or piece of equipment has no cost, often a generic or configurable item whose variants carry the cost while the parent is $0, dynamic pricing has nothing to work with and the price collapses to $0. The fix is to set the cost: manually, or by having the generic item pull the minimum, maximum, or average from its variants. This one is worth hunting down, because a $0 cost also quietly wrecks your job costing.
Poor signal in the field. Because dynamic prices are computed rather than stored, a tech in a dead zone can watch prices fail to populate. A static book never has this problem. It is a real trade-off of going all-dynamic, and it is worth knowing before you convert the whole book.
Which one do you have?
Answer one question: is the price correct on the estimate? If the estimate is right and only the catalog shows $0, it is dynamic pricing behaving normally and there is nothing to fix. If the estimate is also wrong or blank, you have a $0 cost or a static item with no price, and that is a data problem worth fixing. If the items are not there at all, that is Problem 1, not a pricing problem.
The faster way to find the real gaps
Both of these trace back to how the book is set up: uncategorized services on one side, $0-cost items on the other. Those are exactly the things a read of your export surfaces at once, instead of one item at a time on a tablet in a driveway. The free Pricebook Health Audit reads your ServiceTitan export and shows you where the book is uncategorized, where costs are missing, and where the structure is fighting you, in about five minutes, no login. If the mobile problem is a symptom of a book that was never set up to run in the field, that is where you see it. When the deeper fix is the book itself, that is what a pricebook build is for, and the same setup discipline shows up in the common setup mistakes that create these exact headaches.