Wave vs Nexa The Real Comparison for Refurbished Phone Sellers
Wave
$19/mo ($228/yr)
VS
Nexa
$279 once — own forever
or 3 payments of $99
Break even: 14.7 months at Wave's current price.
Does Wave Fit Refurbished Phone Sellers? Our Read
What refurbished phone sellers need from their software, from sources outside Wave and outside Nexa:
Refurbishers need an IMEI/MEID field on every purchase and sale record, because many phones have no serial number. Under California AB 632, dealers may report an IMEI or MEID to law enforcement in place of a serial number. If the number isn't available at purchase, the dealer gets up to 10 extra days to report it. The bill analysis says businesses that buy used electronics to refurbish or recycle them must hold a secondhand dealer license and follow dealer laws. Dealers report serialized property they take in daily or on the first working day after receipt. Other states and cities have their own rules. (leginfo.ca.gov)
Sellers need to track the warranty terms attached to each refurbished phone sold. The FTC says implied warranties on used goods apply when the seller deals in such goods. A seller can disclaim them only conspicuously and generally in writing, with wording such as 'as is', and some states don't allow 'as is' sales. Federal law bars disclaiming implied warranties if you offer a written warranty. A written warranty on a product costing more than $10 must be titled 'full' or 'limited'. Written warranties on products costing more than $15 must be available before purchase. Invoices and receipts therefore need to show the warranty term, or the 'as is' disclaimer, for each unit. (ftc.gov)
Sellers who take card or app payments should expect a Form 1099-K and should keep their own sales and cost records. The IRS says the 1099-K threshold was restored to payments over $20,000 and more than 200 transactions, which is mainly relevant to sellers who sell through online marketplaces or payment apps. Filing is triggered when gross reportable payments exceed $20,000 and the number of transactions exceeds 200. The IRS page does not say that income is taxable whether or not a form arrives, so use your own records. (irs.gov)
Wave covers the bookkeeping side of a refurbished-phone business well. Its free Starter plan includes unlimited invoices, bills and bookkeeping records. Pro at $19 a month adds automatic bank import, automatic categorizing, late-payment reminders and receipt-friendly record keeping, which helps with the sales and cost records you need if a Form 1099-K arrives. It does not cover the trade's core compliance need as far as its feature list shows. The list mentions no IMEI/MEID field on purchase and sale records, no per-unit warranty tracking, and no secondhand-dealer reporting. Invoices can carry your own text, but nothing here confirms a structured field for each unit's warranty term or 'as is' wording.
Nexa has the same gap. It offers invoices, estimates, expenses, bank reconciliation, profit and loss, and receipt scanning, so the bookkeeping side is comparable to Wave's. For stock it has only a simple count per product, with no full inventory management. That is not unit-level tracking of IMEI numbers, and nothing in its feature set covers daily dealer reporting. Online card payments go only through your own Stripe account. There is no point-of-sale or card reader, and no QuickBooks or Xero sync. It is software you own and run yourself, with no hosted support desk or vendor-run onboarding. If you use its automated emails or reminders, they send only while Nexa is open on one of your devices.
Over three years, Wave Pro is $19 a month, or $228 a year, which comes to $684. Nexa is $279 once (or 3 payments of $99). With the optional $4.99 a month Cloud Sync it comes to $458.64 over the same period, and without sync it stays at $279 but runs on one device. Nexa is cheaper, but price isn't the deciding factor here. If you're happy with Wave's bookkeeping, there's no strong reason to move for this trade. Either way, keep IMEI, warranty and dealer-report records in a purpose-built tool.
Our read for refurbished phone sellers: Neither tool tracks IMEI/MEID per unit, per-unit warranty terms or dealer reporting, so use a serialized-inventory or secondhand-dealer compliance tool for that and keep whichever bookkeeping app you already use.
Read on each linked page in October 2026. Check them again before you decide; vendors change plans often.
Bottom Line
Wave costs refurbished phone sellers $228/year at today's list price. Nexa is $279 once for invoicing, scheduling, CRM, time tracking and accounting in one suite — so after 14.7 months it has cost less than Wave, 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.
Can it pay for itself?
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 Wave 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 refurbished phone sellers: Neither Wave 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 $684 for Wave over three years.
Choose Nexa if:
You're done paying monthly forever
You're a solo operator or small team (1-5)
You need financial suite and task manager in one tool
You're tired of price increases
You want to own your tools like you own your equipment
Choose Wave if:
You have a large team (10+) needing enterprise features
You're deeply invested in Wave's specific workflow
You need a feature Nexa doesn't have yet
Sound Familiar?
The first thing he does with any phone, before a screwdriver touches it, is run the IMEI, because a gorgeous handset that's blacklisted, still financed, or carrier-locked is a paperweight, and he's not sinking a screen and a battery into a dead end. Cleared phones go on the bench for triage: battery health, screen response across the whole panel, Face ID or fingerprint, cameras front and back, every button and the charge port. The common jobs are a screen swap and a battery replacement, and here the trap is parts, a cheap aftermarket screen that ghosts or loses touch sensitivity is a return waiting to happen, so he pays up for quality and watches his margin shrink on the cheaper models where the repair cost is a big slice of the resale price. Cosmetic grading is a discipline: an A is genuinely clean, a B has light wear, a C is functional but scuffed, and he photographs the actual scratches so a buyer who wanted pristine isn't surprised. The thin-margin reality is that a mid-tier phone might only clear forty dollars after a sixty-dollar battery-and-screen job, so he has to choose which devices are even worth refurbishing. He boxes them clean, with a protector on and a tested cable, like a retail unit, because presentation closes the sale.
Checking IMEI status so a phone isn't blacklisted, financed, or carrier-locked before you invest parts into it
Sourcing quality screens and batteries when cheap aftermarket parts cause touch issues and returns
Disclosing grade honestly (A/B/C cosmetic) so a 'like new' phone doesn't come back over a scuff
Battery and screen replacement costs eating the margin on lower-end models
The books and job tracking 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. Wave solves some of it. So does Nexa. The difference is what you are left holding in three years.
What Wave Actually Costs Refurbished Phone Sellers
Today's list price is $19/month — $228 a year, from Wave's own pricing page. Every figure below is that price, multiplied. Nothing is projected.
Three years at today's price
Year 1$228
Year 2$228
Year 3$228
Three years of Wave$684
Nexa: $279 once (or 3 × $99). Over the same three years, that is $405 less.
If Wave 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-by-Feature
Feature
Wave
Nexa
Invoicing
✓
✓
Scheduling
✗
✓
CRM
✗
✓
Time Tracking
✗
✓
Full Accounting
✓
✓ (SIMPL)
Task Management
✗
✓
Works offline
✗
✓
Price
$19/mo
$279 once or 3 × $99
3-Year Total
$684
$279
You own it?
No — stop paying, lose access
Yes — forever
✓ and ✗ for Wave come from its own published feature list. — means the feature isn't in that list, which is not the same as Wave lacking it: check with them. Three years is at today's price.
What "$279 Once" Does And Doesn't Buy
It buys the software, not a service contract. You install Nexa and it runs on your machine. There is no seat count, and nothing stops working if you stop paying, because there is nothing to stop paying.
Wave's monthly fee is not only rent. It pays for their hosting, their support desk, and their engineers shipping changes every week. If those matter to how you work, that is a real thing you would be giving up.
Cross-device sync is the one optional extra — $4.99/month if you want your data mirrored between machines. Skip it and Nexa still works; you just sync manually.
The honest risk of buying once: you are betting on us still being here to improve it. The honest risk of renting: the price is theirs to raise, and the graveyard section below is a record of tools that did exactly that.
What Wave Does Better
Straight from Wave's own feature set. If one of these is the reason you pay them, that reason does not disappear because Nexa is cheaper.
Free plan covering unlimited invoices and bookkeeping
Bank transaction import on Pro
Receipt capture
Late payment reminders
Simple enough to run without an accountant
A free plan to start on (with limits), so you can use Wave before paying anything.
Wave is the better call if you need free plan covering unlimited invoices and bookkeeping specifically, or if your team is large enough that per-seat pricing still beats buying software outright.
What Wave Is Built For
Wave says it is built for small business owners and solopreneurs at every stage, not accountants. Its page names freelancers, contractors and consultants. (waveapps.com)
The Starter plan costs $0 and includes unlimited estimates, invoices, bills and bookkeeping records. (waveapps.com)
Pro costs $19 USD a month or $190 USD a year. It adds automatic bank transaction import (for banks Plaid supports), automatic merging and categorizing of bank transactions, and automated late-payment reminders at 3, 7 and 14 days after the due date. (waveapps.com)
Pro lets you put your logo and brand colors on invoices, remove Wave branding from footers, and attach files to invoices and estimates. It also adds user roles (admin, editor, viewer), and the payroll manager and Block Advisors tax pro roles are free. (waveapps.com)
Online card payments on Starter cost 2.9% + $0.60 (Amex 3.4% + $0.60). On Pro the first 10 transactions each month are 2.9% + $0, then 2.9% + $0.60. (waveapps.com)
Wave Advisors starts at $149 a month and includes a dedicated bookkeeper and monthly financial statements. Payroll is an add-on starting at $25 a month in one region and $40 in the other; the page does not say which price applies where. (waveapps.com)
Wave lists a mobile app for invoices, expenses and receipts, and 256-bit SSL encryption with PCI-DSS Level 1 certification. Live chat and email support runs Monday to Friday, 9 AM to 4:45 PM Eastern, and is tied to optional add-ons. (waveapps.com)
What people outside Wave and outside Nexa say:
NerdWallet lists a free plan and straightforward invoicing as pros. Its cons are no built-in third-party integrations, no advanced features such as mileage, time tracking or inventory, no live support unless you pay, and no audit trails. (nerdwallet.com)
NerdWallet says "An overwhelming number of Wave reviewers criticize its customer support." It adds that the paid plan "doesn't address Wave users' biggest complaint: customer service." (nerdwallet.com)
Tech.co praises the free tier, affordable add-ons and the way Wave "does the basics well." It concludes "Wave is definitely worth it" for side businesses that don't need specialist accounting features. (tech.co)
Tech.co criticizes Wave for lacking advanced features such as budgeting, cash flow projections, stock handling and project accounting, and for struggling to scale with growing businesses. It also says phone and live chat support come at a premium. (tech.co)
Read on each linked page in October 2026. Check them again before you decide; vendors change plans often.
Where business tools fit — for a refurbished phone seller
Software doesn't do the actual work — it automates the business around it. And that part is the same for every refurbished phone seller: 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.
1
Find the work
Win the job
↓
A lead, a call, a referral — and a quote or estimate that turns it into a booked job.
CRM / contacts
Estimates & proposals
Booking / scheduling
then ↓
2
Manage the work
Do the job
↓
The part you actually get paid for — with the time, materials, add-ons, and tasks tracked as you go, not guessed at later.
Job / project tracking
Time tracking
Expenses, materials & add-ons
then ↓
3
Bill for it
Send the bill
↓
The work becomes the invoice — the hours, the add-ons, the materials, the deposit credited — totaled and sent, instead of re-typed at 9pm.
Invoicing
Deposits & credits
then ↓
4
Get paid
Collect payment
↓
Paid by card or link, the deposit credited, and what's overdue chased — without you doing it by hand.
Card / online payments
Automatic reminders
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.)
Watch a job become an invoice
This is the connection that makes the rest worth it. A refurbished phone seller's job already holds the services, the hours, the add-ons, and the materials — so the invoice builds itself from the work instead of you re-typing it at 9pm. Toggle an add-on or nudge the hours and watch it recompute.
The job Refurbished iPhone 13, new battery and screen
Export your data — Go to Settings → Data Export. Download customers, invoices, transactions, and accounts.
2
Set up Nexa — 15-minute setup. Import your client list and bank transactions from CSV.
3
Parallel run — Run both for 1-2 weeks. Re-create recurring invoices in Nexa and check your bank imports.
4
Cancel Wave — Cancel paid features. Your free account data stays accessible for records.
✓ 30-day money-back guarantee. Zero risk.
What This Means for Refurbished Phone Sellers
The median refurbished phone seller earns $32,000/year. At $228/year, Wave 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 refurbished phone sellers. You own it like you own your a phone repair toolkit (pentalobe drivers, suction cup, spudgers, picks).
Is Nexa actually right for a refurbished phone seller?
An honest fit check — because the wrong tool is worse than no tool.
Right for you if
You run solo or a small team — like the 40,000 refurbished phone sellers in the US who do, and you wear every hat.
You're tired of paying every month for a monthly subscription stack and a pile of apps that don't talk to each other.
You want invoicing, scheduling, and client tracking in one place — not scattered across five apps.
You'd rather own your software once, the way you own your a phone repair toolkit (pentalobe drivers, suction cup, spudgers, picks).
Look elsewhere if
You have a large team that needs enterprise seats, granular roles, and dedicated admin staff — Nexa is built for solo and small operators (1–5), and a bigger platform will serve you better.
You need full payroll for a large team or deep, SKU-level inventory — that's not what Nexa is for.
You're genuinely happy paying monthly and don't mind stitching tools together. No tool fixes a workflow you already like.
The honest fit: if you're a solo or small refurbished phone sellers business that owns its tools and is sick of renting software, Nexa replaces your whole stack for $279 once. If you're scaling into a large team with dedicated admin staff, a bigger platform may fit better — and we'd rather tell you that now than sell you the wrong thing.
Refurbished Phone Sellers by the numbers — by place
The books and job tracking 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.
What refurbished phone sellers actually deal with
Checking IMEI status so a phone isn't blacklisted, financed, or carrier-locked before you invest parts into it
Sourcing quality screens and batteries when cheap aftermarket parts cause touch issues and returns
Disclosing grade honestly (A/B/C cosmetic) so a 'like new' phone doesn't come back over a scuff
Battery and screen replacement costs eating the margin on lower-end models
A day in the life of a refurbished phone seller
The first thing he does with any phone, before a screwdriver touches it, is run the IMEI, because a gorgeous handset that's blacklisted, still financed, or carrier-locked is a paperweight, and he's not sinking a screen and a battery into a dead end. Cleared phones go on the bench for triage: battery health, screen response across the whole panel, Face ID or fingerprint, cameras front and back, every button and the charge port. The common jobs are a screen swap and a battery replacement, and here the trap is parts, a cheap aftermarket screen that ghosts or loses touch sensitivity is a return waiting to happen, so he pays up for quality and watches his margin shrink on the cheaper models where the repair cost is a big slice of the resale price. Cosmetic grading is a discipline: an A is genuinely clean, a B has light wear, a C is functional but scuffed, and he photographs the actual scratches so a buyer who wanted pristine isn't surprised. The thin-margin reality is that a mid-tier phone might only clear forty dollars after a sixty-dollar battery-and-screen job, so he has to choose which devices are even worth refurbishing. He boxes them clean, with a protector on and a tested cable, like a retail unit, because presentation closes the sale.
The tools a working refurbished phone seller actually owns
a phone repair toolkit (pentalobe drivers, suction cup, spudgers, picks)
a hot plate or heat mat and screwdriver organizer for screen swaps
battery-health and IMEI-check diagnostic apps
stock of replacement screens, batteries, and charge-port flex cables
calibrated screen protectors, cleaning kit, and retail-style boxes for shipping
The tools of the trade — each a one-time buy that earns its keep for years.
a phone repair toolkit (pentalobe drivers, suction cup, spudgers, picks)
a hot plate or heat mat and screwdriver organizer for screen swaps
battery-health and IMEI-check diagnostic apps
stock of replacement screens, batteries, and charge-port flex cables
calibrated screen protectors, cleaning kit, and retail-style boxes for shipping
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.
How To Read This Page
We make Nexa. It is one of the two options compared here, so read this with that in mind. We have tried to make Wave's case the way we would want ours made — their strengths above are their own published feature list, not our summary of it.
The prices are Wave's published list prices, checked on the date shown in the sources below. Plans change; check theirs before you decide.
No customer quotes appear on this page because we do not have any from refurbished phone sellers we can verify. For user testimony, read the independent reviews — Wave on G2 and on Capterra — where the reviewers are not selling you anything.
Check the price yourself:Wave's own pricing page is the source for every figure above, read on the date shown in the sources section below.
We are not neutral about subscriptions, and that is the argument, not a hidden assumption: software you pay for once is cheaper over three years than software you rent, unless you need something only the rented one does.
How we put this guide together
We build a refurbished phone seller'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 refurbished phone seller — 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.
Where the numbers come from
Vendor pricingQuickBooks $456/yr, Wave $228/yr, FreshBooks $516/yr, Square — taken from each company's published plans, last verified September 2026. Pricing moves; each name above links straight to that vendor’s own pricing page so you can confirm it before you decide.
Income contextThe $32,000 median we cite for the typical refurbished phone seller is occupational median annual pay from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (Occupational Employment & Wage Statistics), compiled April 2026. We use it only to show software spend as a share of real income — your own numbers will differ.
Three-year mathMulti-year totals are today's list price multiplied by the number of years. No price rise is projected, so the figure can be checked against the vendor's own pricing page; if they raise it, the real cost is higher.
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.
FAQ
Is Nexa really a Wave replacement?
For solo refurbished phone sellers and small teams, yes. invoicing, scheduling, CRM, time tracking, task management, and full accounting — all for $279 once. Wave may be better if you have a large team (10+) or need enterprise-specific features.
What does Wave do that Nexa doesn't?
Wave has features like Free plan covering unlimited invoices and bookkeeping and Bank transaction import on Pro that some businesses rely on. For most solo refurbished phone sellers, these aren't dealbreakers.
How fast does Nexa pay for itself?
At $19/month, Nexa pays for itself in 14.7 months. After that: $228 saved every year.
Can I pay in installments?
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.