What auto upholstery need from their software, from sources outside Jobber and outside Nexa:
Jobber covers much of what an auto upholstery shop needs to run jobs. Quotes and invoices with online payments are on the $49/month core plan. The Connect plan adds quote and invoice follow-ups and QuickBooks Online sync, which helps when an accountant needs clean books for sales tax. Higher plans add job costing, two-way SMS, and photo and video storage, and the Core, Connect and Grow plans include 1-on-1 product support. Jobber is built for home services, though, not vehicles. Its route optimization and crew features matter little for a shop that works on cars in a bay. Nothing in the information given confirms that its invoices split materials, fabrication labor and installation labor, so check that before relying on it. Written estimates with signed authorization, and a recorded approver and time for any price increase, are also not confirmed on either side. Those rules are described for California auto repair generally, and whether they apply to a given upholstery shop is not confirmed.
Nexa covers the paperwork side of this trade. It has estimates and quotes that convert to invoices. Its client pay portal lets customers sign estimates and pay by card through the shop's own Stripe account. It tracks jobs with costing and profit per job, tracks sales tax, and keeps expense records. It also has a CRM, a booking page and a payroll CSV of hours times rate. What it lacks matters for a shop with an outside accountant or a front desk. It has no QuickBooks or Xero sync or import, no text messages or calls, and no point-of-sale or card reader. It has no stock tracking beyond a simple count per product, so no reorder points. Its automated emails and reminders 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-run onboarding. Like Jobber, it is not confirmed to split invoice lines by material, fabrication and installation labor in the way the tax rule needs.
Over three years, Jobber's $49/month plan comes to $1,764 ($588 a year). Nexa is $279 once, or $458.64 over three years if you add Cloud Sync at $4.99/month to use it on more than one device. That is a real saving. A shop that already relies on Jobber's QuickBooks sync, SMS to customers or vendor support should stay, because Nexa has none of those. A one-device shop that mainly needs estimates, signed approvals, invoices and job profit, and that is comfortable with email-only reminders sent while the app is open, can reasonably try Nexa. Either way, confirm first that the invoice can show materials, fabrication labor and installation labor as separate lines, and that you can record who approved a price increase.
Our read for auto upholstery: Stay with Jobber if you rely on QuickBooks sync, texting customers or vendor support, which Nexa lacks; Nexa is the cheaper option for a one-device shop that needs only estimates, invoices and job costing.
Read on each linked page in October 2026. Check them again before you decide; vendors change plans often.
Jobber costs auto upholstery $588/year at today's list price. Nexa is $279 once for invoicing, scheduling, CRM, time tracking and accounting in one suite — so after 5.7 months it has cost less than Jobber, 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 Jobber 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 auto upholstery: Stay with Jobber 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 $1,764 for Jobber over three years.
Invoicing, time tracking, 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. Jobber solves some of it. So does Nexa. The difference is what you are left holding in three years.
Today's list price is $49/month — $588 a year, from Jobber'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 $1,485 less.
If Jobber 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 | Jobber | Nexa |
|---|---|---|
| Invoicing | ✓ | ✓ |
| Scheduling | ✓ | ✓ |
| CRM | ✓ | ✓ |
| Time Tracking | — | ✓ |
| Full Accounting | — | ✓ (SIMPL) |
| Task Management | — | ✓ |
| Works offline | — | ✓ |
| Price | $49/mo | $279 once or 3 × $99 |
| 3-Year Total | $1,764 | $279 |
| You own it? | No — stop paying, lose access | Yes — forever |
✓ and ✗ for Jobber come from its own published feature list. — means the feature isn't in that list, which is not the same as Jobber lacking it: check with them. Three years is at today's price.
Straight from Jobber's own feature set. If one of these is the reason you pay them, that reason does not disappear because Nexa is cheaper.
Jobber is the better call if you need built for home services specifically, or if your team is large enough that per-seat pricing still beats buying software outright.
Jobber is built for home and commercial field service businesses. Its homepage names 12 trades, including cleaning, HVAC, landscaping, plumbing, roofing and tree care, and says it serves service pros in over 50 industries. (getjobber.com)
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 auto upholstery trimmer: 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.)
Jobber plus whatever else you're paying for:
Email yourself this comparison?
The median Auto Upholstery Trimmer earns $48,000/year. At $588/year, Jobber 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 auto upholstery. You own it like you own your Walking-foot industrial sewing machine for heavy materials.
An honest fit check — because the wrong tool is worse than no tool.
The honest fit: if you're a solo or small auto upholstery 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.
Invoicing, time tracking, 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.
Auto upholstery is old-world craft running on an industrial sewing machine. A typical job might be a classic car interior, a worn-out daily driver's seats, or a sagging headliner, and almost none of it can be fully quoted from the outside. The real work begins with teardown: pulling the seat, removing the old cover by snipping the hog rings, and discovering what the foam and frame actually look like underneath, which is frequently worse than the customer admitted or knew. From there it is pattern-making, often using the old cover as the template, cutting new material whether it is OEM-match vinyl, leather, or cloth, and sewing it up on the walking-foot machine that can chew through layers of hide and foam. Hog rings cinch the new cover down over fresh foam and batting, pulled tight so there are no wrinkles. Headliners are their own headache, gluing fabric to a board and fighting it back into the roof without bubbles. The material side dominates the calendar: a color match might be backordered for weeks, and the customer's car sits in the shop the whole time, with the customer phoning to ask when their daily driver will be back. The frustrations are estimate risk on teardown surprises, lead-time risk on materials, and the simple pressure of bespoke work that takes as long as it takes while a customer waits.
Real auto upholstery near you who run their business on Nexa — book directly, no platform fee. Are you an auto upholstery trimmer? Post your business and get found in your area — $2.99 one-time. Or browse every auto upholstery trimmer 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 $1,505–$5,330 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 an auto upholstery trimmer'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 an auto upholstery trimmer — 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 auto upholstery and small teams, yes. invoicing, scheduling, CRM, time tracking, task management, and full accounting — all for $279 once. Jobber may be better if you have a large team (10+) or need enterprise-specific features.
Jobber has features like Built for home services and Mobile app for field teams that some businesses rely on. For most solo auto upholstery, these aren't dealbreakers.
At $49/month, Nexa pays for itself in 5.7 months. After that: $588 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