What painters need from their software, from sources outside Housecall Pro and outside Nexa:
Housecall Pro covers the day-to-day running of a painting crew well. It has scheduling and dispatching, estimates, a price book, invoicing, online payments, financing, time tracking, payroll, job costing, GPS and "On My Way" texts. It also has live phone and chat support, a Spanish-language mobile app, and QuickBooks Online sync from Essentials up. The listed features don't mention what is specific to painting. They include no fields for EPA lead-safe firm and renovator certification, no storage for signed Renovate Right pamphlet receipts or the three-year per-job lead-safe records, no California down-payment cap on estimates and invoices, and no year-to-date subcontractor tracking against the 2026 Form 1099-NEC threshold. Those would have to be handled outside the software.
Nexa covers the office side at a much lower cost. It has estimates and proposals that convert to invoices, payment plans, a client pay portal with estimate signing through your own Stripe account, a CRM, jobs with profit per job, a crew view of assigned jobs, time tracking, expenses, bank reconciliation, and 1099 summaries. It works offline and has a Spanish interface. It does not run payroll. It has no QuickBooks or Xero sync, no text messages or calls, no GPS or dispatch board, and no hosted support or vendor-run onboarding. Its automated emails, such as reminders and follow-up sequences, send only while Nexa is open on one of your devices. It doesn't list lead-safe certification fields, pamphlet receipts or a deposit-cap control either, so the compliance records need a separate system for both tools.
Over three years, Housecall Pro at $79 a month costs $948 a year, or $2,844. The Max plan is $329 at the monthly rate. Nexa is $279 once, or 3 payments of $99, and adding Cloud Sync at $4.99 a month brings three years to $458.64. A solo painter who mostly needs estimates, invoices, job profit and 1099 summaries, and who is fine without payroll or texting, can reasonably move to Nexa and save money. A painter with employees, who relies on payroll, customer texts, GPS or phone support, should stay with Housecall Pro, because Nexa has none of those.
Our read for painters: Stay with Housecall Pro if you run a crew and rely on payroll, texting, GPS or live support; only a solo painter with simple office needs should consider Nexa, and neither tool handles lead-safe records.
Read on each linked page in October 2026. Check them again before you decide; vendors change plans often.
Housecall Pro costs painters $948/year at today's list price. Nexa is $279 once for invoicing, scheduling, CRM, time tracking and accounting in one suite — so after 3.5 months it has cost less than Housecall Pro, and you own it after that. What it is not: hosted-for-you software with a support desk and a roadmap you can lobby. That is the trade, and the rest of this page is the detail behind it.
Nexa is $279 once, about $23 a month over its first year. Its Drain Guard reads your expenses (from a linked bank, an imported statement, or ones you type in), finds the charges that repeat, and adds them up by the month. Keep or Cut then walks you through them one at a time. Cancel $23 a month of charges you'd forgotten about and Nexa has paid for itself inside the first year, before you count the Housecall Pro bill you'd stop paying.
It depends on what you find and what you cancel, so we don't promise a number. In our demo data, Drain Guard finds 5 subscriptions adding up to $110.13 a month. That is sample data, not a customer's.
The verdict for painters: Stay with Housecall Pro if the needs in our read above apply to you. If they don't, Nexa covers the core invoicing, scheduling and books for $279 once against $2,844 for Housecall Pro over three years.
Invoicing, scheduling and job tracking are the pieces of that day. Some tools rent you each piece separately. A few — Nexa among them — bundle the lot and carry their own booking link, with no per-appointment cut. The sections below price both routes honestly.
None of that is a software problem you can buy your way out of in one click — it is why the tool you pick matters more than what it costs. Housecall Pro solves some of it. So does Nexa. The difference is what you are left holding in three years.
Today's list price is $79/month — $948 a year, from Housecall Pro's own pricing page. Every figure below is that price, multiplied. Nothing is projected.
Nexa: $279 once (or 3 × $99). Over the same three years, that is $2,565 less.
If Housecall Pro raises its price, the three-year cost goes up; if it cuts it, the cost comes down. We don't guess which. Add-ons, extra seats and card-processing fees are not included, on either side.
| Feature | Housecall Pro | Nexa |
|---|---|---|
| Invoicing | ✓ | ✓ |
| Scheduling | ✓ | ✓ |
| CRM | ✓ | ✓ |
| Time Tracking | — | ✓ |
| Full Accounting | — | ✓ (SIMPL) |
| Task Management | — | ✓ |
| Works offline | — | ✓ |
| Price | $79/mo | $279 once or 3 × $99 |
| 3-Year Total | $2,844 | $279 |
| You own it? | No — stop paying, lose access | Yes — forever |
✓ and ✗ for Housecall Pro come from its own published feature list. — means the feature isn't in that list, which is not the same as Housecall Pro lacking it: check with them. Three years is at today's price.
Straight from Housecall Pro's own feature set. If one of these is the reason you pay them, that reason does not disappear because Nexa is cheaper.
Housecall Pro is the better call if you need online booking for home services specifically, or if your team is large enough that per-seat pricing still beats buying software outright.
Housecall Pro describes itself as 'Tailored for teams of 1 to 100+' and aimed at home service pros across 50+ industries, including HVAC, plumbing, electrical, cleaning, lawn care and pest control. (housecallpro.com)
What people outside Housecall Pro and outside Nexa say:
Read on each linked page in October 2026. Check them again before you decide; vendors change plans often.
Software doesn't do the actual work — it automates the business around it. And that part is the same for every painter: find the work, manage it, bill for it, get paid. Each step has a tool — and the right single tool runs the whole loop, so the handoffs are automatic and you get back to the actual work. Tap a step to see what gets automated.
A lead, a call, a referral — and a quote or estimate that turns it into a booked job.
The part you actually get paid for — with the time, materials, add-ons, and tasks tracked as you go, not guessed at later.
The work becomes the invoice — the hours, the add-ons, the materials, the deposit credited — totaled and sent, instead of re-typed at 9pm.
Paid by card or link, the deposit credited, and what's overdue chased — without you doing it by hand.
You can stitch four separate subscriptions across these four steps, or run one tool that does the whole flow so a booking becomes a job becomes an invoice becomes a payment without re-typing. Either way the goal is the same: less time on the business of the business, more on the actual work. (Nexa is built to be the one — but the honest options for each step are above and below.)
This is the connection that makes the rest worth it. A painter's job already holds the services, the hours, the add-ons, and the materials — so the invoice builds itself from the work instead of you re-typing it at 9pm. Toggle an add-on or nudge the hours and watch it recompute.
You didn't write this invoice — the job did.
Housecall Pro plus whatever else you're paying for:
Email yourself this comparison?
The median painter earns $42,000/year. At $948/year, Housecall Pro is a recurring slice of that — paid again every year, whether the year was good or not. Owning the same jobs outright is $279 once, and the slice stops.
Nexa is $279 once. Invoicing, scheduling, CRM, time tracking, accounting — all connected, built for painters. You own it like you own your Airless sprayer (Graco, Titan).
An honest fit check — because the wrong tool is worse than no tool.
The honest fit: if you're a solo or small painters business that owns its tools and is sick of renting software, Nexa replaces your whole stack for $279 once. If you're scaling past a handful of crews, a fleet platform may fit better — and we'd rather tell you that now than sell you the wrong thing.
Local rates and saturation vary widely — price for the city you serve, not a national average.
Year-round construction in SoCal. Fire season (June-November) drives restoration demand. Drought impacts landscaping. Earthquake retrofitting is ongoing market.
Extreme summer heat drives HVAC demand. Hurricane risk on Gulf Coast. Year-round construction. Rapid population growth in DFW, Austin, Houston, San Antonio creates sustained demand. Freeze events (like 2021) create emergency plumbing/HVAC surge.
Hurricane season June-November creates massive restoration demand. Snowbird season November-March boosts service volume 30-40%. Year-round construction. Pool service is year-round industry. Pest control peaks in summer humidity.
Harsh winters in upstate, moderate in NYC. Construction limited in winter upstate. NYC market is enormous but hypercompetitive. Brownstone/pre-war building maintenance is specialized trade. NYC licensing is notoriously complex.
Your people are already online — swapping real numbers, tool picks, and war stories. Here's where to find them.
Active community — tool picks, pricing, and day-to-day questions.
Open on Reddit →Active community — tool picks, pricing, and day-to-day questions.
Open on Reddit →Active community — tool picks, pricing, and day-to-day questions.
Open on Reddit →Active community — tool picks, pricing, and day-to-day questions.
Open on Reddit →Invoicing, scheduling and job tracking are the pieces of that day. Some tools rent you each piece separately. A few — Nexa among them — bundle the lot and carry their own booking link, with no per-appointment cut. The sections below price both routes honestly.
Painting is ninety percent preparation. Before any colour goes on I'm moving furniture, covering floors, masking trim, filling holes and cracks, sanding, and priming stains and patches so they don't flash through. On exteriors it's scraping loose paint, caulking gaps, replacing rotten trim, and power-washing days before I paint so the siding is dry. Then it's cutting in edges with a brush and rolling walls, two coats, watching the wet edge so there are no lap marks. The weather runs my exterior season: too hot, too humid or rain in the forecast and the day moves. Quoting is where I win or lose money. I walk every job, measure, count doors and windows, and note the repairs, because a cheap-looking job with bad walls can eat two extra days. I help clients pick colours and sheens, and I order the paint in advance. Clean-up happens every night. Most of my work comes from referrals and neighbours who see my truck in front of a house they like.
Real painters near you who run their business on Nexa — book directly, no platform fee. Are you a painter? Post your business and get found in your area — $2.99 one-time. Or browse every painter on Nexa →
The tools of the trade — each a one-time buy that earns its keep for years.
Here's the bar that matters: you spent $830–$2,590 on tools that last for years, and never thought twice. So why should the software cost more than your whole kit — every single year? Hold it to the same standard as a good tool: $279, once.
We build a painter's guide the same way every time, and we'd rather you trust it than take it on faith. Nexa is our product, so the test we hold ourselves to is simple: a tool only "wins" a job here when it genuinely does that job better for a painter — and where something free, open-source, or buy-once does it better, we say so and link you to it. Where Nexa falls short (payroll is the honest example), we name the alternative outright.
Found something out of date? Prices change and we don't catch every move the day it happens. This guide is published and maintained by the Nexa team; if a figure here is wrong, tell us and we'll fix it — getting it right matters more to us than the sale.
For solo painters and small teams, yes. invoicing, scheduling, CRM, time tracking, task management, and full accounting — all for $279 once. Housecall Pro may be better if you have a large team (10+) or need enterprise-specific features.
Housecall Pro has features like Online booking for home services and GPS tracking that some businesses rely on. For most solo painters, these aren't dealbreakers.
At $79/month, Nexa pays for itself in 3.5 months. After that: $948 saved every year.
Yes. Nexa is $279 as a one-time payment, or 3 payments of $99 ($297 total). Either way it's a one-time purchase — no subscription, no recurring fees ever.
Own your tools. Stop renting your software.
Get Nexa — $279 Once