What stump grinders need from their software, from sources outside Housecall Pro and outside Nexa:
Housecall Pro covers the day-to-day running of a stump-grinding business well. It has scheduling and dispatching, estimates, a price book, online booking, invoicing, online payments, time tracking, job costing, vehicle GPS and "On My Way" texts. Flat-rate pricing is on the Essentials plan, and QuickBooks Online sync is also on a higher plan than the $79 one. That helps with quoting by stump size, though nothing on its list is built specifically for per-inch, per-area or hourly quotes with a minimum charge. It has no stated place to store an 811 locate ticket number, request date and expiry date, and nothing that tracks license, insurance and certification renewals by jurisdiction. You would need a custom workaround or a separate record for those.
Nexa covers quotes, estimates and proposals that convert to invoices, payment plans, a client pay portal through your own Stripe account, a CRM with a public lead form, a public booking page, and jobs with costing and profit per job. It can assign jobs to team members, and it sends the day's stops to Google Maps in time order. It also has a full bookkeeping set (expenses, bank reconciliation, profit and loss, 1099 summaries, sales tax tracking, receipt scanning) and works offline. It does not have text messages, calls, GPS or fleet tracking, a dispatch board, QuickBooks sync, or a street-address field on a client. Those gaps matter when a job site is the address that counts. It has no stated 811 locate fields or license tracking either, so it shares Housecall Pro's gap there. Its automated emails send only while Nexa is open on one of your devices, and it comes with 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 $458.64 over three years if you add the optional Cloud Sync at $4.99 a month. The savings are real, but only worth taking if you can live without texts, GPS and QuickBooks sync. If you use "On My Way" texts, vehicle tracking, route optimization or QuickBooks sync, stay with Housecall Pro. A grinder working alone, who mostly needs quotes, invoices, card payments and bookkeeping and is comfortable running the software themselves, could reasonably choose Nexa.
Our read for stump grinders: Stay with Housecall Pro if you rely on customer texts, GPS or QuickBooks sync, because Nexa has none of them, and consider Nexa only if you want just quotes, invoices and bookkeeping at a much lower cost.
Read on each linked page in October 2026. Check them again before you decide; vendors change plans often.
Housecall Pro costs stump grinders $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 stump grinders: Stay with Housecall Pro 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 $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 stump grinder: 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 Stump Grinder 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 stump grinders. You own it like you own your Self-propelled stump grinder with carbide cutting teeth.
An honest fit check — because the wrong tool is worse than no tool.
The honest fit: if you're a solo or small stump grinders 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.
Stump grinding is a machine-moving business as much as a grinding one, because the grinder is heavy and self-propelled but slow, so half the job is trailering it to the site and then getting it across a soft lawn on plywood without tearing up the grass. Before the teeth ever touch wood I'm thinking about what's underground, because I call 811 for utility locates and respect the paint marks, since a stump sitting over a gas or fiber line is the difference between a ninety-dollar job and a catastrophe I can't afford. The quoting trap is the phone estimate: a fourteen-inch stump flush to the ground is fifteen minutes, but an old oak with a four-foot root flare and surface roots running across the yard is an hour of grinding and a fortune in tooth wear, so I'd rather see it. The carbide teeth are a consumable, and a hidden rock or a buried chain-link fence post will chip them, so I carry spares and swap them right in the customer's yard. Then there's the cleanup expectation: people assume the hole gets filled and the mountain of grindings disappears, but hauling a truckload of mulch off is a separate scope I have to spell out. I grind below grade for replanting, rake it back, and load what they don't want kept.
Real stump grinders near you who run their business on Nexa — book directly, no platform fee. Are you a stump grinder? Post your business and get found in your area — $2.99 one-time. Or browse every stump grinder 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 $10,570–$50,600 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 stump grinder'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 stump grinder — 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 stump grinders 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 stump grinders, 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