What tile setters need from their software, from sources outside Housecall Pro and outside Nexa:
Housecall Pro covers the office side of a tile setter's work well: estimates, a price book, invoicing, online payments, job costing, time tracking, scheduling and QuickBooks Online sync (from Essentials). It also has a texted 'On My Way' update, GPS, dispatching, payroll, live phone and chat support, and an app in English and Spanish. The $79 plan is the one that does the core job. Two tile-specific needs are not in its feature list. One is pricing by square foot, linear foot, hour or flat bid, with a materials line that can be dropped for customer-supplied tile. The other is a record of which saws and dust controls were used on each job. Check the price book on the free 14-day trial, which Housecall Pro says includes full Max access, before you rely on it for labor-only quotes. A solo setter who kneels and bends all day, and does the estimates at night, will use only part of the rest.
Nexa covers quotes, estimates and proposals that convert to invoices, recurring invoices, payment plans, and a pay portal where clients pay by card and sign estimates through your own Stripe account. It tracks cost and profit per job and has time tracking. For an owner-operator doing their own books it adds expenses, profit and loss, sales tax tracking, 1099 summaries and receipt scanning. It also has a Spanish interface and works offline. Like Housecall Pro, it has no silica equipment or dust-control tracking, and I can't confirm from its feature list that it handles per-square-foot or per-linear-foot lines with materials left off, so test that before you buy. It has no texting or calls, no QuickBooks or Xero sync, no GPS, route optimization or dispatch, and it does not run payroll (no payroll 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 hosted support desk or vendor onboarding. Nexa's publisher wrote this page, so weigh that.
Over three years, Housecall Pro at $79 a month costs $2,844 ($948 a year). Nexa costs $279 once, or $458.64 with Cloud Sync at $4.99 a month. The gap is real, but it only pays off if Nexa's quote lines fit how you price. A solo setter who quotes, invoices and keeps their own books can try Nexa and save the difference. A crew that needs customer texts, dispatch, payroll, QuickBooks sync or phone support should stay with Housecall Pro, since Nexa lacks all of those. Neither tool covers silica records, so keep a separate log of saws and dust controls for each job either way.
Our read for tile setters: Stay with Housecall Pro if you run a crew or rely on texts, payroll, QuickBooks sync or phone support, since Nexa has none of those; only a solo setter whose pricing fits Nexa's quotes should switch.
Read on each linked page in October 2026. Check them again before you decide; vendors change plans often.
Housecall Pro costs tile setters $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 tile setters: 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 tile setter: 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 tile setter 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 tile setters. You own it like you own your Wet saw (Rubi, MK Diamond, or DeWalt).
An honest fit check — because the wrong tool is worse than no tool.
The honest fit: if you're a solo or small tile setters 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.
Tile is only as good as what's underneath, so every job starts with the surface: floors checked for flatness and deflection, walls in wet areas built with cement board or a waterproofing membrane, because a leaking shower destroys the framing behind it. Showers get the most care: sloping the floor to the drain, waterproofing every seam and corner, and flood-testing before any tile goes on. Layout comes next, snapping lines so the rows are straight, the cuts at the edges are balanced, and no one ends up with a thin sliver of tile at the doorway. Then setting, spreading thinset with the right trowel, back-buttering large tiles, and levelling as I go, since big-format tiles show every lip. Cutting takes time: wet saw for porcelain, careful notches around pipes and outlets. Grout and sealing are a separate day. I quote by the square foot, with prep, waterproofing and demolition listed separately, and the client usually buys the tile, so I tell them how much to order with waste.
Real tile setters near you who run their business on Nexa — book directly, no platform fee. Are you a tile setter? Post your business and get found in your area — $2.99 one-time. Or browse every tile setter 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 $740–$3,510 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 tile setter'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 tile setter — 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 tile setters 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 tile setters, 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