Housecall Pro vs TradesTimer
What Housecall Pro is
A comprehensive field-service management platform designed to handle scheduling, dispatching, estimates, invoicing, and payments for home-service businesses.
Best for: Growing teams that need to manage multiple technicians, dispatch jobs, and provide a professional, end-to-end customer experience from estimate to payment.
Pricing at a glance
$59 FLAT / MO
Basic plan roughly $59/mo (1 user); higher tiers scale up. Pricing changes — verify.
Verified 2026-06-08
$0 FREE — FULL APP
Where Housecall Pro is strong
- Full-scale business operations suite
- Integrated customer payment processing
Where Housecall Pro falls short for trades
- Requires manual configuration of jobsite locations and schedules before work begins
- Requires managing a paid subscription for a feature set that extends far beyond simple time tracking
Housecall Pro problems, in users' own words
These aren't our words — they're from public threads written by people using Housecall Pro (or shopping for a way out). Each quote links to the original discussion.
I need something Like Jobber or HouseCall Pro but that has all of the features that I'm looking for. … I have extensivly trialed numerous app suites however none of the ones I've tried check all of the boxes for features I'm looking for.
Platform shopping is a treadmill: every suite does 80% of what you need and charges for 100%. TradesTimer deliberately does one box — honest hours — and does it free.
Why I built a Housecall Pro alternative
I did the invoicing at an electrical contractor, so I'll say this with love: making the invoice was never the hard part. Trusting the hours that went on it was. Housecall Pro sells you the whole front office — booking, dispatch, payments — and the time clock rides along as one feature among forty.
If you want the front office, fine. But if what's actually bleeding money is untracked hours between jobsites, you don't need a platform subscription to fix it. Fix the hours with a free automatic tracker, and invoice however you already do.
What TradesTimer does differently
- Automatically detects stops and trips via GPS, eliminating the need to manually start or stop timers
- Keeps all location data stored locally on your device for enhanced privacy
The verdict
Housecall Pro is a powerful, all-in-one operations suite for growing service companies. TradesTimer is a specialized, free tool for solo tradespeople who want to automate their billable hours and mileage logging without manual entry or complex software management.
Page last verified 2026-06-08. If Housecall Pro has changed pricing or features since then and this page is stale, email support@tradestimer.com and we'll fix it.
Free. The whole app.
The whole time-tracking app is free — no trial, no feature gate, no ads, no per-user fees. (Encrypted cloud backup is on the roadmap.)
- Automatic day reconstruction from background GPS
- Unlimited stops, drives, and days
- Review and edit any block
- Rounded billable-hours summary, shareable as plain text
- Automatic mileage log, exportable for taxes
- 7-day summary view
- All location data stays on your device
Your location history stays on your phone.
There is no TradesTimer server storing your location trails. No account. No sign-up. Your GPS history lives on the device that recorded it — for as long as you want it. The only time anything leaves your phone is when you choose to share your billable-hours summary yourself.
The app does not talk to any third-party service with your location. Nothing about where you've been is uploaded anywhere. See the privacy policy for the full detail.