What plant care services need from their software, from sources outside QuickBooks and outside Nexa:
Plant care in North Carolina turns on three things: each applicator's commercial license (a Core exam plus a category such as Turf and Ornamental, renewed on a five-year cycle), per-application spray records (client name and address, treated site, target pest, date, product trade name, EPA registration number and amount, kept at least two years), and invoices that separate taxable from nontaxable work. In Minnesota, for example, lawn and garden service and tree trimming are taxable, while initial landscaping and construction contracts are not. QuickBooks covers the bookkeeping well. The plan we priced, at $38 a month, lists bank feed reconciliation, comprehensive reporting, 800+ app integrations and an accountant-friendly standard format. Its feature list says nothing about license, category or recertification tracking, and nothing about a spray record. Its list also doesn't say how invoice lines are split by tax treatment, so confirm that with your accountant. Higher tiers cost more and the first-months discount is temporary, so check the current price on QuickBooks's own pricing page before you commit.
Nexa covers daily operations: invoices, estimates, recurring jobs, job costing with profit per job, crew assignment with a crew view, time tracking, expenses, bank reconciliation, sales tax tracking, and today's stops sent to Google Maps in time order. It shares both compliance gaps. It has no license or recertification tracking and no spray log. A Nexa client record also has no street-address field, so it can't hold the address a spray record requires. It has no app marketplace, so a records tool can't connect to it. It doesn't run payroll (no payroll taxes, pay stubs or direct deposit), only a CSV of hours times rate. It has no QuickBooks import, so switching means re-keying your history. It comes with no hosted support desk. Its automated emails (reminders, sequences, workflows) send only while Nexa is open on one of your devices.
Over three years QuickBooks at $38 a month is $456 a year, or $1,368. Nexa is $279 once, or $458.64 with Cloud Sync at $4.99 a month, which you need if the office and crew use more than one device. We make Nexa, so weigh this accordingly: the savings are real, but they don't buy what keeps a spraying business legal. Whichever you pick, add a separate pesticide or field-service records tool that stores every per-application field plus your state's extras, tracks each applicator's license, category and recertification date with advance warnings, and lets you pull a record by client address. QuickBooks's integrations give that tool somewhere to connect, and its accountant familiarity helps if your books are already shared. Nexa fits only a small, one-device crew with payroll handled elsewhere, no accountant working in its books, and the records tool kept separate.
Our read for plant care services: Keep QuickBooks and add a dedicated pesticide-application records and license-tracking tool, because Nexa lacks the integrations, address field and payroll that setup relies on.
Read on each linked page in October 2026. Check them again before you decide; vendors change plans often.
QuickBooks costs plant care services $456/year at today's list price. Nexa is $279 once for invoicing, scheduling, CRM, time tracking and accounting in one suite — so after 7.3 months it has cost less than QuickBooks, 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 QuickBooks 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 plant care services: Stay with QuickBooks 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 $1,368 for QuickBooks over three years.
Scheduling, job tracking, invoicing and client records are the pieces of that day. Some tools rent you each piece separately. A few — Nexa among them — bundle the lot and carry their own booking link, with no per-appointment cut. 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. QuickBooks solves some of it. So does Nexa. The difference is what you are left holding in three years.
Today's list price is $38/month — $456 a year, from QuickBooks'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 $1,089 less.
If QuickBooks 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.
Today's sticker price only tells you what a subscription costs today. These are dated changes, each linked to the announcement or report it comes from. Tap one for the numbers.
For renewals on or after February 1, 2026, Pro Plus and Mac Plus went from $999 to $1,149 a year for one user, and each extra seat from $200 to $230.
Source: SWK Technologies, Insightful Accountant (Dec 2, 2025)
From July 1, 2025: Simple Start $35 to $38, Essentials $65 to $75, Plus $99 to $115, Advanced $235 to $275 a month.
Source: Woodard Report (May 27, 2025)
After September 30, 2024, new US customers can no longer buy these Desktop editions. Existing subscribers can keep renewing.
Source: Intuit
Only changes we can link to a vendor announcement or a named publication are listed. Plans, add-ons and discounts vary, so check the vendor's current pricing page before you decide.
| Feature | QuickBooks | Nexa |
|---|---|---|
| Invoicing | ✓ | ✓ |
| Scheduling | ✗ | ✓ |
| CRM | ✗ | ✓ |
| Time Tracking | — | ✓ |
| Full Accounting | ✓ | ✓ (SIMPL) |
| Task Management | ✗ | ✓ |
| Works offline | — | ✓ |
| Price | $38/mo | $279 once or 3 × $99 |
| 3-Year Total | $1,368 | $279 |
| You own it? | No — stop paying, lose access | Yes — forever |
✓ and ✗ for QuickBooks come from its own published feature list. — means the feature isn't in that list, which is not the same as QuickBooks lacking it: check with them. Three years is at today's price.
Straight from QuickBooks's own feature set. If one of these is the reason you pay them, that reason does not disappear because Nexa is cheaper.
QuickBooks is the better call if you need industry standard - accountants know it specifically, or if your team is large enough that per-seat pricing still beats buying software outright.
QuickBooks Online is aimed at freelancers and new businesses, small and mid-size businesses, product-based businesses, and nonprofits. Larger or more complex operations are pointed to Desktop Enterprise (up to 40 users) or Intuit Enterprise Suite (multi-entity). (quickbooks.intuit.com)
What people outside QuickBooks 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 interior plant care technician: 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.)
QuickBooks plus whatever else you're paying for:
Email yourself this comparison?
The median Interior Plant Care Technician earns $38,000/year. At $456/year, QuickBooks 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 plant care services. You own it like you own your Long-spout watering can and a backpack water tank with a wand.
An honest fit check — because the wrong tool is worse than no tool.
The honest fit: if you're a solo or small plant care services 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.
Scheduling, job tracking, invoicing and client records are the pieces of that day. Some tools rent you each piece separately. A few — Nexa among them — bundle the lot and carry their own booking link, with no per-appointment cut. The sections below price both routes honestly.
I start at a downtown law firm with forty interior plants, and the first thing I do is probe the soil on the big fiddle-leaf figs because the cleaning crew keeps dumping coffee-pot water into them. Three are soaked and one is already dropping yellow leaves, so I skip watering those and note it. I move through the floor with my backpack tank, watering only what reads dry, wiping dust off the monstera leaves so they can actually photosynthesize, and pinching spent growth. In the corner conference room I spot the fine webbing of spider mites on a palm, so I isolate it mentally, spray neem on the whole cluster nearby, and flag it for a follow-up next week. Second stop is a boutique hotel where the pothos in the stairwell needs a hard prune and the front-desk ferns need feeding. I rotate a few plants toward the light because they're leaning hard. The afternoon is a tech office where they want a 'jungle vibe' but every desk plant is in a dark interior bay with no window, so I keep swapping in tougher ZZ plants and snake plants and managing their expectations. I end the day logging which plants are declining so I can plan replacements before the client notices.
Real plant care services near you who run their business on Nexa — book directly, no platform fee. Are you an interior plant care technician? Post your business and get found in your area — $2.99 one-time. Or browse every interior plant care technician on Nexa →
The tools of the trade — each a one-time buy that earns its keep for years.
You paid for these once because good tools last. That's the bar your software should clear too — priced like a tool you own, $279 once, not a subscription that costs more than your kit every year.
We build an interior plant care technician'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 interior plant care technician — 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 plant care services and small teams, yes. invoicing, scheduling, CRM, time tracking, task management, and full accounting — all for $279 once. QuickBooks may be better if you have a large team (10+) or need enterprise-specific features.
QuickBooks has features like Industry standard - accountants know it and 800+ app integrations that some businesses rely on. For most solo plant care services, these aren't dealbreakers.
At $38/month, Nexa pays for itself in 7.3 months. After that: $456 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