Joist
Mobile-first estimating, invoicing, and payments app built for solo trade contractors.
Pricing tiers
| Plan | Price | User limit |
|---|---|---|
| Basics | $10/mo | 1 |
| Pro | $17/mo | 1 |
| Elite | $32/mo | 1 |
| Run (intro) | $70/mo | Unlimited |
Run tier intro price $70/mo, standard $100/mo, adds job scheduling. 14-day free trial, no card required.
Key features
- On-site estimates
- Invoicing & deposits
- Payments
- Client photo/markup tools
From the field
Evaluated from HVAC industry experience — not personally run day-to-day
Pros
- Templated line items go straight at the two biggest estimating failures I saw on the office side: estimates that varied depending on who wrote them, and estimates that quietly dropped a line item because nothing forced a check.
- Mobile, on-site estimate creation matters because the lag between walking a job and getting a number in front of the customer is where deals get lost — anything that collapses that gap is solving a real, costly problem.
- The low entry price ($10-32/mo for Basics/Pro/Elite) means a solo operator or small shop can standardize estimating without a big financial commitment just to find out if it helps.
Cons
- A templated tool only fixes inconsistency if the templates are actually built out and kept current — if nobody owns maintaining the item library, you end up with an expensive, consistent way to still miss things.
- I haven't personally run this day-to-day, so I can't speak to how it holds up once multiple people are submitting estimates independently — that's exactly what the free trial should be used to check before committing.
If inconsistent or incomplete estimates sound like what I just described, a cheap, templated mobile estimating tool is the right category of fix — Joist is a reasonable low-cost way to test whether standardized templates actually solve it for your shop before paying for something heavier.
Not currently an affiliate link (application status: not-applied). Update this component's logic to add the #ad disclosure the moment the affiliateProgram.status for this tool flips to "approved" in tools.json — never before.
Contractor reviews
Submitted by other HVAC contractors, approved before publishing — separate from the editorial review above.
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