What laundry service operators need from their software, from sources outside Wave and outside Nexa:
Wave covers general invoicing and bookkeeping well. It has unlimited invoices and bookkeeping on its free plan. The Pro plan at $19 a month adds bank import, late-payment reminders and receipt capture. It is simple enough to run without an accountant. It does not cover what this trade turns on. Its listed features have no garment-level intake record with condition and age, no field for the care label or the process used, and no way to calculate a depreciated settlement under the Fair Claims Guide. Its listed features also don't show tax handling that follows the delivery location, as Washington requires for pickup-and-delivery jobs. Wave doesn't list these features, so check with Wave before relying on it for them.
Nexa covers the business side of a laundry operation: invoices, recurring invoices, a client pay portal through your own Stripe account, jobs with costing, and bookkeeping that includes sales tax tracking and receipt scanning. It does not cover the trade's core needs either. It has no garment records, no care-label or process fields, and no claim valuation. Its clients have no street-address field, so it can't tax by where the customer receives the items. It also has no point-of-sale or card reader and no text messages. If you use its automation, its emails send only while Nexa is open on one of your devices. It is software you run yourself, with no hosted support desk.
Over three years Wave Pro comes to $684 at $19 a month. Nexa is $279 once, or $458.64 with Cloud Sync at $4.99 a month, or $99 in each of three payments for the licence. If you stay on Wave, the free plan handles invoicing and bookkeeping. Pay for Pro only if you use bank import or automatic reminders. Neither product solves the garment-claims and delivery-tax problem. Keep your invoicing tool for billing and books, and add a tool built for laundry and dry-cleaning shops that records each garment at intake.
Our read for laundry service operators: Neither Wave nor Nexa records garment condition, care label and process, or taxes by delivery location, so a laundry operator needs a garment-tracking tool built for laundry and dry-cleaning shops.
Read on each linked page in October 2026. Check them again before you decide; vendors change plans often.
Wave costs laundry service operators $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 laundry service operators: Neither Wave nor Nexa is the main system for this work; start with software built for it. Nexa only makes sense beside it, at $279 once against $684 for Wave over three years.
Scheduling, invoicing, client records 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. 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 laundry service operator: 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 laundry service operator'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.
Wave plus whatever else you're paying for:
Email yourself this comparison?
The median laundry service operator earns $32,000/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 laundry service operators. You own it like you own your Washer and dryer (commercial grade).
An honest fit check — because the wrong tool is worse than no tool.
The honest fit: if you're a solo or small laundry service operators 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.
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 →Scheduling, invoicing, client records 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.
I run a wash-and-fold service with pickup and delivery. My route starts in the morning collecting bags from homes, offices and a couple of short-term rental hosts, each one weighed and tagged with the customer's name and preferences: detergent, fabric softener or none, hang-dry items, and how they like things folded. Back at my space, every load is sorted by colour and fabric, stains are pre-treated, and delicates are washed separately. Mistakes are expensive and personal, a shrunk sweater or a lost sock that someone swears existed, so I count items on intake for some clients and follow their notes exactly. Folding is where the time goes, and a neat, consistent fold is part of what people pay for. Commercial clients, gyms, salons and rentals, bring big, regular volume with tight turnaround, while households are steady weekly customers. I price by the pound with a minimum, plus delivery fees, and many clients are on subscriptions. Machines, utilities and detergent are my main costs, so I track cost per pound carefully.
Real laundry service operators near you who run their business on Nexa — book directly, no platform fee. Are you a laundry service operator? Post your business and get found in your area — $2.99 one-time. Or browse every laundry service operator 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 a laundry service operator'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 laundry service operator — 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 laundry service operators 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 laundry service operators, 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