What crime scene cleaners need from their software, from sources outside Housecall Pro and outside Nexa:
Housecall Pro covers the day-to-day running of a service business well. That includes scheduling and dispatching, estimates, a price book, invoicing, online payments, time tracking, payroll, job costing, vehicle GPS, and live phone and chat support. QuickBooks Online sync and employee GPS tracking come with the Essentials plan. None of the features it lists track what this trade is built around. There is nothing for OSHA bloodborne pathogen training dates, three-year training records, medical records kept for employment plus 30 years, or hepatitis B vaccination offers. There is no per-state registration or biohazard waste permit tracking with expiry dates. It also has nothing that splits a job between insurance and a state victim compensation program, each with its own caps.
Nexa covers invoicing, estimates and proposals, a client pay portal through your own Stripe account, a CRM with notes and tags, jobs with costing and profit per job, crew assignment, time tracking, a payroll CSV of hours times rate, and bookkeeping. Nothing in its feature list handles training or medical records, permit and registration expiry, or multi-payer job billing, so the trade's core needs are uncovered here too. It also lacks what Housecall Pro offers: no GPS, route optimization or dispatch board, no QuickBooks or Xero sync, no texting, and no real payroll with taxes, pay stubs or direct deposit. Its automated emails send only while Nexa is open on one of your devices. It is software you own and run yourself, with no vendor-run onboarding or support desk.
Over three years Housecall Pro at $79 a month costs $2,844. Nexa costs $279 once, or 3 payments of $99, plus $458.64 in total if you add the optional $4.99 monthly Cloud Sync (the $279 is included in that figure). If you already run Housecall Pro for dispatch, payroll and QuickBooks, keep it. Nexa would drop those tools and add none of the compliance tracking you need. If you are choosing from scratch, either one will handle scheduling and invoicing. Neither should be your record of training, medical files, permits and payer splits, so plan to track those in a separate compliance and records tool.
Our read for crime scene cleaners: Neither covers training and medical records, state permit tracking or multi-payer job billing, so you need a separate compliance and records tool whichever one you use for scheduling and invoicing.
Read on each linked page in October 2026. Check them again before you decide; vendors change plans often.
Housecall Pro costs crime scene cleaners $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 crime scene cleaners: Neither Housecall Pro 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 $2,844 for Housecall Pro over three years.
Scheduling, 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 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 crime scene cleaner: 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 crime scene cleaner'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 Crime Scene Cleaner earns $38,000/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 crime scene cleaners. You own it like you own your full-face respirators and bloodborne-pathogen PPE suits.
An honest fit check — because the wrong tool is worse than no tool.
The honest fit: if you're a solo or small crime scene cleaners 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.
Scheduling, 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 and carry their own booking link, with no per-appointment cut. The sections below price both routes honestly.
The call comes in at odd hours because death doesn't keep business hours. I can't enter until the authorities release the scene, so half my job is waiting by the phone and then moving fast when I get the green light. Today it's an unattended death discovered after several days, which means the work is as much about odor and decomposition as it is about visible biohazard. I suit up fully before the door, double-glove, and check my respirator seal, because what I'm about to clean can carry pathogens. I work in containment, sectioning the room with plastic so nothing tracks into the rest of the house. The fluids have gone through the carpet into the pad and into the subfloor, so I'm not just wiping surfaces, I'm cutting out and bagging the materials that can't be saved into red biohazard waste. The family is somewhere in the house, and I keep my voice low and my descriptions vague. When the visible work is done I disinfect, then run an ATP test to confirm the surface is actually clean, not just clean-looking. Then come the hours of paperwork: the waste manifest, the insurance documentation, the photos that prove what I removed and why.
Real crime scene cleaners near you who run their business on Nexa — book directly, no platform fee. Are you a crime scene cleaner? Post your business and get found in your area — $2.99 one-time. Or browse every crime scene cleaner 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 $1,630–$7,050 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 crime scene cleaner'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 crime scene cleaner — 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 crime scene cleaners 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 crime scene cleaners, 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