What drainage contractors need from their software, from sources outside Housecall Pro and outside Nexa:
Housecall Pro covers the day-to-day running of a drainage crew well. It handles scheduling and dispatching, estimates, invoicing, online payments, job costing, time tracking, payroll and vehicle GPS. Its higher plans add photo reports, checklist automations and QuickBooks Online sync, and every plan includes live phone and chat support. The $79 a month plan fits a one-person shop. What its feature list does not show is anything built for this trade's paperwork. That includes stormwater permit status and erosion-control upkeep per site, first-work and notice dates for state mechanics-lien timing, and a per-payee 1099 total with taxpayer-ID status for subcontractors. You would still keep those records somewhere else.
Nexa covers the money side of the work. It has invoices, estimates and proposals that convert to invoices, jobs with costing and profit per job, expenses, bank reconciliation, profit and loss, and 1099 summaries. That last one is the nearest match to the subcontractor-payment need. Clients can pay by card through your own Stripe account, and it works offline. It does not track permits or lien notice dates either. It has no GPS, route optimization or dispatch board, no texting, no QuickBooks or Xero sync, and it does not run payroll. Its automated emails send only while Nexa is open on one of your devices, and as software you own and run yourself it has no hosted support desk or vendor-run onboarding.
Over three years Housecall Pro at $79 a month comes to $2,844 ($948 a year). Nexa is $279 once, or 3 payments of $99. Adding optional cloud sync at $4.99 a month brings it to $458.64 over the same period. If you run a one-person shop with a few subcontractors, Nexa is far cheaper for invoicing and 1099 totals. If you dispatch crews, need GPS or texting, or rely on QuickBooks sync, Housecall Pro does that and Nexa does not. Either way, track permits and lien notice dates in a separate tool built for them.
Our read for drainage contractors: Neither tool tracks stormwater permits or lien-notice deadlines, so you need a construction compliance and document-tracking tool alongside whichever one you pick.
Read on each linked page in October 2026. Check them again before you decide; vendors change plans often.
Housecall Pro costs drainage contractors $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 drainage contractors: 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.
Time tracking, invoicing, job tracking and the books 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. 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 drainage contractor: 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.)
Housecall Pro plus whatever else you're paying for:
Email yourself this comparison?
The median drainage contractor earns $55,000/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 drainage contractors. You own it like you own your mini-excavator and trencher.
An honest fit check — because the wrong tool is worse than no tool.
The honest fit: if you're a solo or small drainage contractors 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.
Time tracking, invoicing, job tracking and the books 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.
You start at a house where the backyard turns into a pond every storm, and before you quote anything you walk it during or right after rain to read where the water collects and where it wants to go. You shoot grades with the laser to confirm there's enough fall to a daylight point or you're piping it to a pop-up emitter out front. The job already booked got its 811 locate, so today you're trenching. The mini-ex opens a line from the low spot, and you set the laser to hold a steady drop so the water actually runs instead of pooling in a belly. You bed the trench with gravel, lay perforated pipe wrapped in filter fabric where it's a French-drain section, switch to solid pipe for the conveyance run, and tie in a catch basin at the worst low point. Backfill goes in lifts and you keep the grade clean. A dewatering pump keeps the trench workable because the water table's high here. The real test is the next big rain, and that's when you get the call if a basin clogged or a pop-up stuck shut, so you flush the line and set the emitter carefully before you leave. You close out by walking the homeowner through how the system sheds water and what not to plant over the line.
Real drainage contractors near you who run their business on Nexa — book directly, no platform fee. Are you a drainage contractor? Post your business and get found in your area — $2.99 one-time. Or browse every drainage contractor 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 $5,290–$21,200 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 drainage contractor'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 drainage contractor — 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 drainage contractors 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 drainage contractors, 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