What trenching contractors need from their software, from sources outside Housecall Pro and outside Nexa:
Housecall Pro is a strong field-service platform for the business side of a trenching company. It covers scheduling and dispatching, estimates, invoicing, online payments, time tracking, payroll, job costing, vehicle GPS and live phone and chat support. Its Essentials plan adds checklist automations, photo reports and QuickBooks Online sync. None of the features listed for it are built for the trade's compliance needs. These are daily competent-person excavation inspection records, trench depth and protective-system records for each job, 811 ticket numbers with start and expiry dates (Missouri, for example, limits work to 21 days per ticket), and locate marks and utility notes. Its checklists and photos could be adapted to hold some of this, but that would be a workaround, not a trench-safety record.
Nexa covers the office side at a much lower price. It has invoices and estimates, a client pay portal through your own Stripe account, jobs with costing and profit per job, crew assignment, today's stops sent to Google Maps, time tracking, a payroll CSV of hours times rate, and bookkeeping with expenses, profit and loss and sales tax tracking. It has no trench inspection log, no protective-system fields and no 811 ticket tracking. It also has no GPS, fleet tracking, dispatch board or route optimization. It does not sync with QuickBooks or Xero, and it does not run payroll (no payroll taxes, pay stubs or direct deposit). It is software you own and run yourself, with no vendor-run onboarding or hosted support desk.
Over three years Housecall Pro at $79 a month costs $2,844. Nexa costs $279 once, or $458.64 with the optional $4.99 monthly Cloud Sync (without sync it runs on one device). Because neither tool is built to document trench safety or track 811 tickets, the price gap does not settle the choice. Keep whichever one you use for quoting, scheduling and billing. Add a dedicated excavation safety and utility-locate documentation tool so the daily inspections, protective-system records and locate tickets are kept for each job.
Our read for trenching contractors: Neither tool covers daily trench inspection records or 811 ticket tracking, so use an excavation safety and utility-locate compliance tool alongside whichever one handles your office work.
Read on each linked page in October 2026. Check them again before you decide; vendors change plans often.
Housecall Pro costs trenching 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 trenching 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 trenching 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 trenching 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 trenching contractors. You own it like you own your Trencher (walk-behind or ride-on — Ditch Witch, Toro, Vermeer).
An honest fit check — because the wrong tool is worse than no tool.
The honest fit: if you're a solo or small trenching 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.
At 7 I call 811 to make sure the locate ticket is still live, because the marks on this job are a week old and I'm not digging until they're current. At 8 I hitch the ride-on trencher to the truck and tow it to the site: a 200-foot irrigation main from the well to the back field. I walk the line first, find the paint and flags for gas and the electric service, and hand-dig potholes where my line crosses them so I can see the actual depth before the chain gets near. Then I set the boom to 24 inches, start at the stake, and keep a steady walking pace, checking depth with a tape every 20 feet. The first half is sandy loam and goes fast; the back half turns to clay and rock and the chain slows to a crawl. I stop to knock mud off the teeth and pull out a rock the size of a basketball. By noon I've got 150 feet. After lunch I finish the run, clean the bottom with a shovel so the pipe has a flat bed, and pile the spoil on the side the plumber wants it. The customer asks about a drain line next month that needs an excavator, so I call the operator I sub bigger work to and set up a look. At 5 it's maintenance: wash the chain, check tension and teeth, grease the fittings, write down the hours. At 6 I finally invoice for Tuesday's job and write the drain-line quote with a rock clause in it.
Real trenching contractors near you who run their business on Nexa — book directly, no platform fee. Are you a trenching contractor? Post your business and get found in your area — $2.99 one-time. Or browse every trenching 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 $12,600–$86,400 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 trenching 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 trenching 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 trenching 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 trenching 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