Most "best invoicing app" lists are written by people who bill for content, not jobs. This one names real published prices for seven apps contractors actually run, states what each one is bad at, and includes our own app — flagged as ours, limits and all.
How this list was made
How this list was made, plainly: we build a job costing app that includes invoicing, and this list comes from public information — each vendor’s own pricing and feature pages, checked on the date below — plus what contractors commonly end up running. We have not conducted hands-on head-to-head tests of these apps, so we make no testing claims and there is no scored comparison table pretending otherwise. Our own app is on the list because it truthfully belongs there; it is marked as ours and its limitations are listed like everyone else’s.
Prices checked on August 30, 2026.
1. Job Cost Pro
Ours — built by this site's founder. Judge accordingly.
Best for: an invoice that is built from what the job actually cost, not a blank template.
Invoices in Job Cost Pro pull from the same receipts and hours already logged against the job, so the number you send a client is tied to a real cost history instead of typed in from memory. That is the whole idea — invoicing and job costing are one workflow here, not two apps stitched together with a spreadsheet in between.
Pricing: Free tier is permanent — 3 active projects, 50 receipts/month, no card. Paid plans $29.99, $49.99, and $149.99/month.
The catch: No estimating, no scheduling, no dispatch — this is a money app, not a calendar app. iPhone and web only today; no Android app. If you invoice flat fees with no job costs behind them, the thing that makes this useful to us is wasted on you.
Free forever — 3 projects, 50 receipts a month. No credit card.
2. Joist
Best for: estimate-to-invoice in one flow, on the phone, at the kitchen table.
Joist built its name on turning an estimate into a signed proposal into an invoice without leaving the app, which is the exact sequence a lot of trades and small remodelers run every week. The mobile-first estimate-to-invoice loop is genuinely well built, and it has the contractor following to show for it.
Pricing: No free plan today. Basics $12/month (5 documents/month), Pro $17/month (unlimited documents and clients), Elite $32/month (adds change orders), and a newer Run plan at $100/month. All tiers get a 14-day trial of full Elite features, no card required.
The catch: The free plan Joist used to offer is gone — every tier is paid now, and the entry tier caps you at 5 documents a month, which a busy contractor clears fast. It is an estimating-and-invoicing tool, not a job-cost tool — nothing here tells you what a job actually cost to build.
3. Jobber
Best for: field service businesses that need scheduling and dispatch as much as invoicing.
Jobber is built around the full field-service loop — booking, scheduling, crew dispatch, route optimization — with invoicing as one piece of a bigger operations system. If your business runs on a calendar of appointments more than a queue of remodels, this is the shape of tool built for you.
Pricing: Core $21/month, Connect $70/month, Grow $105/month, Plus $280/month (annual billing). 14-day trial of Grow-level features, no card required. Job costing itself only arrives at the Grow tier.
The catch: It is priced and built for service-call volume, not project-based remodeling — the jump from Core to Connect to unlock QuickBooks sync and automated invoice follow-ups is steep for a solo or two-person crew, and job costing is locked behind the third tier up.
4. Square Invoices
Best for: someone already taking card payments through Square who wants invoicing bolted on for free.
If you already run a Square reader at the jobsite or a Square Point of Sale, the free Invoices tier is a reasonable way to add invoicing without a second subscription. It covers invoices, recurring invoices, estimates, contracts, and basic project workspaces at no monthly cost.
Pricing: Free plan is genuinely $0/month. Plus is $49/month per location (custom templates, payment scheduling); Premium is $149/month per location (lowest processing fees, 24/7 phone support).
The catch: The free tier is real, but it is accounting-and-payments-shaped, not job-shaped — nothing connects an invoice line to what that specific job cost you in materials and labor. And the paid tiers price per location, which adds up fast for a contractor running one crew out of a truck rather than a storefront.
5. Invoice2go
Best for: the cheapest paid entry point on this list, if 30 invoices a year is enough.
Invoice2go is a straightforward invoicing app — send a professional invoice, take a card payment, track when a client viewed it — with three tiers scaling by invoice volume rather than by feature depth. It's aimed squarely at solo operators who want the simplest send-an-invoice, get-paid loop.
Pricing: Plans "start at $5.99/month" per the vendor's own site (Starter tier, roughly 30 invoices/year, 3.5% card fee). Professional raises the invoice cap and drops the card fee to 3.0%; Premium is unlimited invoices with recurring billing and phone support at a 2.9% card fee — we could not confirm the exact Professional and Premium dollar prices from the vendor's own page today, since that part of the pricing table sits behind a region and currency selector.
The catch: The entry tier's 30-invoices-a-year cap is easy to blow through in a single busy month, and none of the tiers do anything with what a job cost to build — it is invoicing and payment collection, full stop.
6. Zoho Invoice
Best for: genuinely free invoicing with no trial clock running out.
Unlike most "free trial" invoicing tools, Zoho Invoice's free plan is permanent — no card required, no 14-day countdown. It covers tax-compliant invoices, recurring billing, quotes, expense tracking, and a client portal, which is a real feature set for zero dollars.
Pricing: Free, permanently — capped at 2 users, 3 active projects, and 500 invoices a year, with "Powered by Zoho Invoice" branding on every invoice. Zoho offers Zoho Billing as a paid step-up for businesses that outgrow those caps.
The catch: The 3-project and 500-invoice caps will eventually bind a growing contractor, and the branding stays on your invoices the whole time you are on the free plan — that is the trade for zero dollars. It is bookkeeping-and-invoicing software, not job costing; the "projects" here are billing containers, not cost centers.
7. QuickBooks Online
Best for: an invoice that lands directly in the books your accountant already reconciles.
QuickBooks Online invoices are QuickBooks Online transactions — no export, no sync step, because the invoicing lives inside the same ledger your accountant closes out every month. For a lot of contractors, that single fact outweighs everything else on this list.
Pricing: Simple Start (entry tier, includes basic invoicing) is $38/month. Project profitability — the job-costing feature — starts on the Plus tier at $140/month as of the August 1, 2026 price increase.
The catch: Job costing is gated behind the $140/month Plus tier — Simple Start gets you invoicing and bookkeeping, not a view of what any specific job cost. And like every general accounting tool here, costs land when someone codes a transaction at a desk, not when the receipt happens at the counter.
8. Wave
Best for: a one-person operation that wants free invoicing and free bookkeeping together.
Wave has kept a genuinely free Starter tier for years — unlimited invoices, estimates, bills, and basic bookkeeping records, with no monthly fee. For someone just starting out who mostly needs to send a professional invoice and keep simple books, it is a real answer.
Pricing: Starter plan is free — unlimited invoices and estimates, card processing at 2.9% + $0.60/transaction. Pro is $19/month and adds branding removal, file attachments, and automated late-payment reminders.
The catch: It is accounting-shaped, like QuickBooks and Zoho — there is no job-level cost view here at any tier. And the free plan's per-transaction card fee has no discount until you move to Pro.
Two different invoicing problems hiding in one search
A contractor searching "best invoicing app" is usually asking one of two different questions, and most lists answer neither well. The first question is "how do I send a professional-looking invoice and get paid faster" — that is a payments-and-templates problem, and Square, Invoice2go, Wave, and Zoho all solve it competently. The second question is "how do I know what this invoice should actually say" — meaning, what did the job cost, and does the number I am about to send reflect that.
Almost nothing on this list answers the second question, because almost nothing on this list is built around a job. QuickBooks and Wave are built around a ledger. Square is built around a payment. Joist is built around a proposal. Jobber is built around a schedule. Job costing, when it shows up at all — Jobber's Grow tier, QuickBooks Plus — arrives as an add-on feature bolted onto a tool designed for something else, not as the thing the tool is actually for.
That distinction is the reason we built ours the way we did, and it is also the honest reason it will not be the right answer for every contractor reading this. If you invoice flat-rate jobs with predictable costs, a job-cost-first invoicing app is solving a problem you do not have — pick from the payments-and-templates side of this list instead.
What to actually check before you pick one
Start with where the number on the invoice comes from. Do you type it in from memory, pull it from an estimate you built weeks ago, or does it reflect what the job has actually cost you in materials and labor as of today? Those are three different levels of trust in the number you are about to send a client.
Then check what happens when a $900 receipt covers two jobs, or a crew splits a day across three sites — can the tool handle that split cleanly, or does it force everything into one bucket and quietly corrupt your job-level numbers? Most of the apps on this list were never asked to answer that question, because they were not built around jobs in the first place.
Then look at where your invoicing tool sits relative to your books. Does it live inside your accounting system already (QuickBooks, Wave, Zoho), sit next to it and require an export (Joist, Invoice2go, Square, Jobber, us), or replace it entirely? None of those is automatically wrong — but know which one you are choosing, because switching later means moving a year of invoices somewhere new.
Finally, price it at the tier you would actually need, not the cheapest advertised number. Job costing on Jobber means the Grow tier at $105/month, not the Core tier at $21. Job costing on QuickBooks means Plus at $140/month, not Simple Start at $38. The headline price and the price of the feature you actually came here for are frequently two different numbers.
Why we put our own app on this list
Because leaving it off would be stranger than including it, and because an anonymous "best of" page that quietly funnels you toward the author's own product is exactly the pattern we dislike about most lists in this category. Job Cost Pro exists because its founder, a working remodeler, bid a $42,000 bathroom at a 30% margin and finished at 12%, having lost track of costs across a job that outran his invoicing tool's ability to keep up with what it actually cost.
So it is on the list, flagged as ours, with its limits stated plainly: iPhone and web only, no estimating, no scheduling, no dispatch. Nobody paid to appear here, there are no affiliate links, and the prices above came off each vendor's own page on the date shown — except the one figure we could not confirm, which the copy says outright rather than guessing. If Jobber, Square, or QuickBooks fits your operation better than we do, that is a fine outcome. The point is a contractor who can trust the number on the invoice, whichever app gets them there.
Who built this
Chris Sibley — remodeling contractor, Fort Worth, TX
Chris closed a $42,000 bathroom remodel thinking he’d made 30%. His accountant ran the real numbers months later: 12% — $7,500 in receipts never made it onto the job. He built Job Cost Pro so that never happens again, and still runs his remodeling company with it every day. That company is the legal entity behind this app: Salvation Home Remodeling LLC, doing business as Job Cost Pro.
It depends on which problem you actually have. For estimate-to-invoice on the phone, Joist. For field-service scheduling plus invoicing, Jobber. For invoicing already tied to your books, QuickBooks or Wave. For free invoicing with no card and no trial clock, Zoho or Wave's Starter plan. If the question underneath your question is "did this job make money," you want invoicing that is built on top of real job costs — ours does that, and the free tier costs nothing to try.
How do I invoice someone as a contractor?
At minimum, a contractor invoice needs your business name and contact info, the client's name and job address, a clear description of the work and materials, the amount due and payment terms, and an invoice number for your records. Most of the apps on this list generate that layout automatically from a template. What separates them is where the numbers on that invoice come from — typed from memory, pulled from an old estimate, or reflecting what the job has actually cost so far.
What are the best apps for contractors?
That is a bigger question than invoicing alone. For invoicing specifically, see the list above. Beyond that, contractors typically need estimating (Joist covers this), scheduling and dispatch (Jobber), receipt capture and job costing (ours, or QuickBooks at the Plus tier), and general bookkeeping (QuickBooks, Wave, or Zoho Books). Very few tools do all four well — most contractors run two or three apps together rather than one that does everything.
What is the best app to make invoices on?
For the fastest path to a professional-looking invoice with no learning curve, Square Invoices' free tier or Wave's Starter plan both work well and cost nothing. For invoices built from real job costs rather than typed-in numbers, that is a narrower category — see the "what to check" section above for how to tell the difference before you commit a year of invoices to one app.
Is Zoho Invoice actually free?
Yes, genuinely — not a trial. The free plan has no expiration and no card requirement, but it does have real caps: 2 users, 3 active projects, and 500 invoices a year, plus "Powered by Zoho Invoice" branding on every invoice you send. If those caps fit your business, it is a legitimately free tool. If you need more projects, more invoice volume, or to drop the branding, that is where Zoho's paid Billing product starts.
Does an invoicing app need to be tied to job costing?
No — plenty of contractors invoice flat-rate work with predictable costs and never need that connection. It matters most for contractors who bid custom or cost-plus work, where the final invoice should reflect what a specific job actually cost in materials, labor, and receipts rather than a number estimated weeks earlier. If that is your situation, look specifically for whether an app can split one receipt across multiple jobs and roll job costs into the invoice automatically — most general invoicing apps on this list cannot.
An invoice built from real job costs is a different invoice.
Log a receipt at the counter, and the job margin — and the invoice — update from what the job actually cost. Free on 3 projects and 50 receipts a month.
