What antique dealers need from their software, from sources outside Wave and outside Nexa:
Wave covers the money side of an antique business and leaves the trade-specific record-keeping to you. The free Starter plan includes unlimited invoices and bookkeeping records. Pro at $19 a month ($228 a year) adds automatic bank import for banks Plaid supports, automatic categorizing, receipt capture, and file attachments. A mall dealer's monthly payout, booth rent, commission and card fees can be imported and categorized as they arrive. A scanned purchase receipt can be attached to the record, and a tax pro can be added to your books at no charge. Wave's list has no per-item record of purchase date and cost, which you need to separate long-term gains (held more than a year) from short-term ones. The IRS taxes net gains on collectibles at up to 28%. Wave also lists no count of reportable transactions, which decides Class A (400 or more a year, with a surety bond) or Class B (399 or fewer) in Minneapolis, and no booth-number field. The practical workaround is to put the date, cost and booth number in each entry's description and keep a running tally of sales. That is manual, but it is the same workaround Nexa needs.
Nexa's maker publishes this page, so weigh this paragraph with that in mind. Nexa's bookkeeping is broader than Wave's free plan. It has expenses, bank reconciliation, profit and loss, a balance sheet, cash flow, sales tax tracking, purchase orders, receipt scanning, and a simple stock count per product. It also works offline, which helps at estate sales and shows with weak signal. Purchase orders and a stock count could carry a piece's cost and a note for its booth. But the stock count has no valuation, and there is no purchase-date or holding-period tracking and no transaction counter for license classes. Its listed features also don't include automatic bank import. It has no point-of-sale or card reader, and online card payments go only through your own Stripe account. It has no QuickBooks or Xero sync and no hosted support desk, because you own and run it yourself. Any automated emails or reminders send only while Nexa is open on one of your devices.
Over three years Wave Pro is $684, and Starter is free if you can live without bank import. Nexa is $279 once, or $458.64 over three years with Cloud Sync at $4.99 a month. Without Cloud Sync it runs on one device. Nexa is cheaper, but both tools leave the same antique-specific gaps, so the price gap doesn't decide this. What decides it is what Wave does that this trade relies on and Nexa's list doesn't show: automatic bank import of mall payouts, a free tax-pro role, and a hosted support team. A dealer already on Wave should stay, and add a per-item log (date bought, cost, booth, date sold) in a spreadsheet to cover the capital-gains and license-class counts. A dealer who works offline, wants one purchase and owns a single device, or wants to pay once could reasonably pick Nexa. They should expect to do the same manual logging and to reconcile the bank by hand.
Our read for antique dealers: Stay with Wave: neither tool tracks per-item cost or license-class transaction counts, but Wave's bank import, tax-pro access and hosted support serve a mall dealer's books better.
Read on each linked page in October 2026. Check them again before you decide; vendors change plans often.
Wave costs antique dealers $228/year at today's list price. Nexa is $279 once for invoicing, scheduling, CRM, time tracking and accounting in one suite — so after 14.7 months it has cost less than Wave, 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 Wave 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 antique dealers: Stay with Wave 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 $684 for Wave over three years.
The books, job tracking, invoicing and client records are the pieces of that day. Some tools rent you each piece separately. A few — Nexa among them — bundle the lot into something you buy once. 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. Wave solves some of it. So does Nexa. The difference is what you are left holding in three years.
Today's list price is $19/month — $228 a year, from Wave'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 $405 less.
If Wave 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 | Wave | Nexa |
|---|---|---|
| Invoicing | ✓ | ✓ |
| Scheduling | ✗ | ✓ |
| CRM | ✗ | ✓ |
| Time Tracking | ✗ | ✓ |
| Full Accounting | ✓ | ✓ (SIMPL) |
| Task Management | ✗ | ✓ |
| Works offline | ✗ | ✓ |
| Price | $19/mo | $279 once or 3 × $99 |
| 3-Year Total | $684 | $279 |
| You own it? | No — stop paying, lose access | Yes — forever |
✓ and ✗ for Wave come from its own published feature list. — means the feature isn't in that list, which is not the same as Wave lacking it: check with them. Three years is at today's price.
Straight from Wave's own feature set. If one of these is the reason you pay them, that reason does not disappear because Nexa is cheaper.
Wave is the better call if you need free plan covering unlimited invoices and bookkeeping specifically, or if your team is large enough that per-seat pricing still beats buying software outright.
Wave says it is built for small business owners and solopreneurs at every stage, not accountants. Its page names freelancers, contractors and consultants. (waveapps.com)
What people outside Wave 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 antique dealer: 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.)
Wave plus whatever else you're paying for:
Email yourself this comparison?
The median antique dealer earns $38,000/year. At $228/year, Wave 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 antique dealers. You own it like you own your Reference guides and price databases.
An honest fit check — because the wrong tool is worse than no tool.
The honest fit: if you're a solo or small antique dealers business that owns its tools and is sick of renting software, Nexa replaces your whole stack for $279 once. If you're scaling into a large team with dedicated admin staff, a bigger platform may fit better — and we'd rather tell you that now than sell you the wrong thing.
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 →The books, job tracking, invoicing and client records are the pieces of that day. Some tools rent you each piece separately. A few — Nexa among them — bundle the lot into something you buy once. The sections below price both routes honestly.
Buying well is the whole business. I'm at estate sales, auctions and house calls most weeks, looking at hundreds of items to find the few worth buying: furniture with original finish, pottery with the right maker's marks, silver, lighting, and the occasional piece nobody else recognised. Knowledge is my inventory; I need to know what's real, what's reproduction, what's been repaired, and what similar pieces have actually sold for recently. Most items need something before they're sellable: cleaning, gentle restoration that doesn't destroy the value, and research into the maker and the date. I sell from a booth in an antique mall, where I pay rent and a commission on sales, plus online listings for pieces that need a wider audience, which means careful photos, measurements and honest condition notes. Shipping large or fragile items is its own skill and cost. I keep records of what I paid and when for every piece, because inventory can sit for months, and I'm constantly deciding what to discount to keep the booth fresh.
Real antique dealers near you who run their business on Nexa — book directly, no platform fee. Are you an antique dealer? Post your business and get found in your area — $2.99 one-time. Or browse every antique dealer on Nexa →
The tools of the trade — each a one-time buy that earns its keep for years.
You paid for these once because good tools last. That's the bar your software should clear too — priced like a tool you own, $279 once, not a subscription that costs more than your kit every year.
We build an antique dealer'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 an antique dealer — 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 antique dealers and small teams, yes. invoicing, scheduling, CRM, time tracking, task management, and full accounting — all for $279 once. Wave may be better if you have a large team (10+) or need enterprise-specific features.
Wave has features like Free plan covering unlimited invoices and bookkeeping and Bank transaction import on Pro that some businesses rely on. For most solo antique dealers, these aren't dealbreakers.
At $19/month, Nexa pays for itself in 14.7 months. After that: $228 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