What lead paint inspectors need from their software, from sources outside Housecall Pro and outside Nexa:
Two separate jobs are in play for a lead paint inspector, and it helps to keep them apart. The first is running the field business: booking, scheduling, invoicing, getting paid, and tracking time and costs. Housecall Pro covers this well, with scheduling and dispatching, online booking, estimates, invoicing, online payments, time tracking, job costing, vehicle GPS, 'On My Way' texts and live phone and chat support. The second is the compliance record. Each inspection report must carry the inspection dates, building address and construction date, owner contact details, each inspector's name, signature and certification number, the testing method and any XRF serial number, and the location of every painted component tested. The firm must keep the report for at least 3 years and give the owner a copy. Individual certifications renew every 3 or 5 years, firms owe EPA fees every 3 years, and states such as Wisconsin add a two-year term, an 8-hour refresher and a required firm affiliation. Housecall Pro lists nothing built for this second job. Its checklists and photo reports, which start on Essentials, might be shaped into report fields, but it lists no property-linked archive and no expiry tracking. Ask to see a checklist that captures every required field before relying on it.
Nexa covers the business side more narrowly. It has invoices, estimates and proposals that convert to invoices, a client pay portal through your own Stripe account, a CRM with notes, jobs with costing and profit per job, assigning jobs to team members, time tracking, a booking page with intake forms, bookkeeping, and today's job stops sent to Google Maps in time order. It works offline. For the compliance job it has no report templates, no report archive and no certification or renewal tracking. A client record also has no street-address field, so tying work to a specific building, which both the report and the retention rule depend on, means a workaround. It has no text messages or calls, no GPS, route optimization or dispatch board, no QuickBooks or Xero sync and no Google Calendar sync. You own and run it yourself, so there is no vendor support desk or onboarding. Its automated emails, sequences and reminders send only while Nexa is open on one of your devices.
Over three years, Housecall Pro at $79 a month costs $948 a year, or $2,844 in total. Nexa costs $279 once, or $458.64 with optional Cloud Sync at $4.99 a month. That gap is real, but it doesn't settle this decision, because neither product produces the report, the 3-year archive or the certification calendar. If you already run on Housecall Pro, don't move just to save money. Its texts, vehicle GPS, dispatching and QuickBooks sync are things Nexa lacks, and crews and travel-heavy schedules lean on them. A solo inspector who needs only invoicing, job costing, time tracking and bookkeeping, and is comfortable owning the software, could reasonably use Nexa to cut cost. Either way, plan on a separate inspection-reporting and certification-tracking tool for the signed reports, the property-linked archive and every individual and firm expiry date, or on a records process you can audit.
Our read for lead paint inspectors: Neither tool covers a lead inspector's core compliance need (required report fields, a 3-year property-linked archive and certification expiry tracking), so add inspection-reporting and certification-tracking software; keep Housecall Pro for field operations if you already use it, and consider Nexa only if you're a solo inspector who wants low-cost invoicing and bookkeeping.
Neither product on this page is built for it. These kinds of software are. The examples are not ours and these are plain links, not affiliate links; each goes to the product's own page for that capability.
Read on each linked page in October 2026. Check them again before you decide; vendors change plans often.
Housecall Pro costs lead paint inspectors $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 lead paint inspectors: Neither Housecall Pro nor Nexa is the main system for this work; start with the specialist software above. 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 lead paint inspector: 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 lead paint inspector'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 Lead Paint Inspector 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 lead paint inspectors. You own it like you own your XRF analyzer for in-place lead-paint readings.
An honest fit check — because the wrong tool is worse than no tool.
The honest fit: if you're a solo or small lead paint inspectors 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.
Day starts with the calibration check - I shoot the XRF against the known standard three times before I take a single billable reading, because an instrument that drifted invalidates everything I do after it. First job is a risk assessment on a pre-1978 rental with a small child, the trigger for most of my work. I go component by component with the XRF - window sills, troughs, door jambs, baseboards, the porch rails - logging each reading against the floor plan, because lead hides on the friction and impact surfaces. The sills read hot, so I take dust wipes with templates to measure how much lead-loaded dust is actually on the surfaces a toddler touches, and a soil sample from the drip line under the old painted siding. Everything's labeled and chain-of-custody is filled out, because the wipes go to the lab and the clearance hinges on lead-loading numbers I can't read in the field. Afternoon is a clearance at a unit that just finished abatement - the family's in a hotel waiting to come home, and they legally can't until my wipes come back under the HUD limits. I document the visual, take the clearance wipes, and explain to the anxious tenant that it's the lab's timeline now, not mine. End of day is writing the risk-assessment report around the pending dust-wipe results, logging XRF readings, invoicing, and making sure tomorrow's client ordered a clearance and not the inspection they think they need.
Real lead paint inspectors near you who run their business on Nexa — book directly, no platform fee. Are you a lead paint inspector? Post your business and get found in your area — $2.99 one-time. Or browse every lead paint inspector 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 $19,350–$46,400 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 lead paint inspector'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 lead paint inspector — 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 lead paint inspectors 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 lead paint inspectors, 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