The three field service giants. All charge monthly forever.
$300/mo
Large operations (10+ techs) with enterprise budgets
$79/mo
Mid-size home service businesses wanting marketing features
$279 once
Growing businesses prioritizing clean UX
ServiceTitan ($300/mo) and Housecall Pro ($79/mo) are both established tools with real user bases, and for most people the honest answer is that either will do the job — the difference shows up in fit, not quality. Over three years the running totals are roughly $12,096 for ServiceTitan and $3,185 for Housecall Pro, because subscription pricing compounds. Read the section below on which one suits your work; the cost table further down shows where the bill actually differs.
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.
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.
| Feature | ServiceTitan | Housecall Pro | Nexa |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pricing | $245–$500/mo (typically $300) | $79–$329/mo (typically $79) | $279 once |
| Five year cost | $20,000+ | $7,740 | $279 |
| Learning curve | Weeks | Days | Hours |
| Best team size | 10-100+ | 3-15 | 1-20 |
If you are choosing between these two, this is the part that matters. Both are established products and neither is a mistake — the question is which fits how you actually work. We have left ourselves out of this section entirely.
Headline prices rarely survive contact with a real invoice. These are the parts of the bill that move: where the ladder starts and ends, what an extra seat adds, and what comes off the top of money you take through the tool. A dash means we do not have that figure recorded — not that the fee is zero.
| ServiceTitan | Housecall Pro | |
|---|---|---|
| How it is priced | Monthly subscription | Monthly subscription |
| Entry price | $245/mo | $79/mo |
| Top published tier | $500/mo | $329/mo |
| Plan people typically land on | $300/mo | $79/mo |
| Per extra user | Priced per technician (office users not separately published); third-party estimate $245–$500 per tech/mo depending on package | Basic 1 user, Essentials up to 5 users, Max 8 users included; $35/mo per additional user (Max) |
| Payment processing | — | Card as low as 2.59% (card-present); ~2.99% online invoice, 3.49% keyed/Amex (per 2026 reviews citing HCP rates); ACH 1% |
| Free tier | No | No |
| Three-year total | $10,800 | $2,844 |
| Five-year total, with increases | $18,000 | $4,740 |
Starter/Essentials boundary (~$300/tech) — reported Starter top and Essentials floor. Essentials adds the mobile estimates and payroll a 1–5 tech shop usually needs
Basic — one user; the solo plan (Essentials $189 is the team tier)
Pricing checked . Vendors change prices without notice — check the vendor before deciding.
Both of these are real products that a lot of businesses run on happily. If a comparison page only tells you what is wrong with the tools it is comparing, it is selling you something. Here is the honest case for each.
ServiceTitan charges more ($300/mo against $79/mo) and tends to offer more depth for its target market. Housecall Pro at $79/mo is the accessible option, though it still reaches $948/year. Recurring pricing compounds, so the multi-year figure is the one that decides it.
There is a third shape to consider, and we should say plainly that it is ours: Nexa is a one-time purchase at $279 covering scheduling, invoicing, CRM, time tracking and job management. It suits people who want to stop paying monthly and can do without staffed support and a large integration ecosystem. If those matter to you, one of the two tools above is the better answer, and we would rather you bought the right thing.
All three are good products. All three charge monthly forever. In 5 years, you'll have paid $6,000-20,000 to rent software. Nexa is $279 to own.
For reference, since we are one of the three options named on this page: Nexa is $279 once, with no monthly fee and no per-seat charge. Whether that beats a subscription depends entirely on how long you would keep paying one.
This section is deliberately one-sided: it collects what operators complain about, which is only useful once you have read what each tool does well above. These are opinions from our own research notes — 64 assessments across 2 business categories — not audited findings or review-site ratings. We show the trade beside each one because most of these are conditional: a complaint about progress billing is decisive for an iron worker and irrelevant to a hair stylist. Where a complaint cites a price, it is the price that operator was quoted at the time.
Enterprise pricing for a solo technician. They want $300+/month — that's more than I make on some days.
Requires an annual contract and costs more than your phone bill. Built for companies with dispatchers, not solo sparkys.
Minimum $300+/month with annual contract. They don't care that you're solo — same price as a 10-truck company.
Built for 20-truck fleets. Way too complex and expensive for a one-man operation. Minimum contract is brutal.
Price went from $49 to $129 in two years. Features I need — parts tracking, warranty management — still aren't included.
Built for service. Alarm install + monthly monitoring don't fit one workflow.
Too expensive for mobile detailing margins. At $79+/month you need to detail an extra car just to pay for the software.
Doesn't handle clearance-test wait time as billable. Doesn't handle hazardous-waste manifest tracking.
Keeps raising prices. I started at $49/month — now they want $129 for features I was already paying for.
Built for plumbing-style service. AV install + calibration doesn't fit.
Assessments are recorded per trade, so the same tool reads differently depending on the work — a complaint about progress billing matters to an iron worker and not to a hair stylist. 9 trades are represented above; we add more as we record them.
Comparing "$X per month forever" against "$279 once" is not a fair fight unless we say what the monthly fee is buying. It buys real things:
Where we think the trade goes the other way: those benefits are priced as rent, they compound every year you keep paying, and you stop having them the month you stop. Which side of that is worth more depends on your business, not on our opinion — run the numbers below on your own tool list rather than taking ours.
30-day money-back guarantee. Replaces both subscriptions.
Pricing verified March 2026.