What metal building erectors need from their software, from sources outside Jobber and outside Nexa:
Full disclosure: Nexa's publisher wrote this page, so weigh it accordingly. The finding below doesn't favor Nexa. Jobber is built for home services, and its listed features don't include the three things an erector's paperwork turns on. Those are job-by-job records of height and fall-protection method (29 CFR 1926 Subpart R) with crew training, retainage and pay-application tracking, and credential records such as MBCEA's AC478 accreditation. What Jobber does give you is useful around the edges. Checklists (Connect), job costing (Grow), and crew scheduling plus unlimited photo and video storage (Plus) could hold a jobsite safety checklist and dated photos of tie-off and decking conditions. QuickBooks Online sync lets your bookkeeper handle monthly progress billing, and 1-on-1 product support comes with Core, Connect and Grow. Those are workarounds you would build yourself, not purpose-built compliance records. The checklists, job costing and crew scheduling also sit on plans that cost more than the $49 Core plan.
Nexa covers general small-contractor work: estimates and proposals that convert to invoices, payment plans, jobs with costing and profit per job, jobs assigned to team members, time tracking, expenses, profit and loss, and offline use. Its Missions with sub-steps, notes and task board could hold a manual safety log, but it has no dedicated retainage, pay-application, fall-protection or credential records. It also has no QuickBooks or Xero sync, no SMS, no dispatch or route tools, and no integration library. Its payroll feature is a CSV of hours times rate, not real payroll. Automated emails send only while Nexa is open on one of your devices. Card payments go only through your own Stripe account. It is software you own and run yourself, with no hosted support desk or vendor onboarding.
Over three years Jobber's $49/month Core plan costs $1,764 ($588 a year), and any higher plan costs more. Nexa is $279 once, or $458.64 with optional Cloud Sync at $4.99/month, and it runs on one device without Sync. Nexa is far cheaper, but neither product closes the gap on retainage, safety records or credentials. If you use Jobber today, keep it only if scheduling, photos and QuickBooks sync earn their cost, and don't treat it as your compliance record. A tool built for construction project management should hold your pay applications, retainage schedule and safety and training records. Nexa is a reasonable low-cost choice only if you want simple invoicing and job costing on one device and will keep the trade records elsewhere.
Our read for metal building erectors: Neither tool tracks retainage, fall-protection records or credentials, so keep those in a construction project-management and safety-records tool, and use Jobber or Nexa only for general scheduling and invoicing.
Read on each linked page in October 2026. Check them again before you decide; vendors change plans often.
Jobber costs metal building erectors $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 metal building erectors: Neither Jobber 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 $1,764 for Jobber 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. 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 metal building erector: 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 metal building erector earns $55,000/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 metal building erectors. You own it like you own your impact wrench for structural bolts.
An honest fit check — because the wrong tool is worse than no tool.
The honest fit: if you're a solo or small metal building erectors 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.
You walk the slab first thing with the anchor-bolt template, and sure enough the concrete crew set one column's bolts a half-inch out, so before any steel flies you're shimming and slotting base plates to make the math work. The crane shows up and the day becomes a choreography of rigging: chokers on a rigid frame, the spreader bar leveling it, two guys on tag lines walking it upright while the connection crew flies the lift to the top to set the bolts. Nothing is plumb when it lands, so the come-alongs and turnbuckles come out and you rack the bays square and plumb, eyeballing the diagonals and the wall lines before you final-torque the primary connections. Wind is the boss; a gust above the threshold and the crane stops and the frame waits, bolted but not braced, while you watch the sky. Once the steel's standing the crew moves to purlins and girts, then sheeting with self-drillers, and that's when a short shipment of wall panels surfaces with the crane already gone. The GC keeps asking why this isn't a two-man job, and you point at the 50-foot clear-span frame and the crane bill. You leave the building braced and the open bays tied off so an overnight wind doesn't rack what you spent the day plumbing.
Real metal building erectors near you who run their business on Nexa — book directly, no platform fee. Are you a metal building erector? Post your business and get found in your area — $2.99 one-time. Or browse every metal building erector 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 $56,900–$188,800 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 metal building erector'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 metal building erector — 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 metal building erectors 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 metal building erectors, 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