ComparePrices checked on vendor sites, September 16, 2026
Housecall Pro for Christmas Lights: Keep It, Add Quoting
Housecall Pro is $59 to $299 a month billed yearly and handles dispatch and invoicing well. No mockup, no measurement, no per-foot rate card. What to add.
Housecall Pro costs $59 to $299 a month billed yearly ($79 to $329 billed monthly) for scheduling, dispatch, invoicing and payments, and it does those jobs well for a lighting crew. It has no mockup, no roofline measurement and no per-foot rate card, so the quote still gets built somewhere else. Prices are from housecallpro.com/pricing, read on September 7, 2026.
Written by the GlowBid founder; prices checked on each vendor's site on September 7, 2026.
I run a permanent lighting company and a decking company in Ottawa. This is the page I wanted when I asked whether generalist field-service software could run the lighting side too. The short answer: keep it for what it is good at, and put a measuring and quoting layer in front of it. The long answer follows.
Three plans, priced per month, cheaper if you commit to a year. Every plan includes phone and chat support, the mobile app, card processing "as low as 2.59%" and a 1 percent fee on bank payments.
Sales proposal tool, recurring service plans, route optimization
No
No
Yes
Trial
14 days, no card
14 days, no card
14 days, no card
In this comparison
3 tools, one table
Prices and features are taken from each vendor's own pages and linked in the table. Tap a tile to jump to it.
What does Housecall Pro do well for a lighting crew?#
Dispatch, and it is not close. Two crews, nine installs on a Saturday in late November, a rain delay on Monday: the drag-and-drop calendar, the on-the-way texts, the crew app with the job details, and the GPS on Essentials and up handle that day well, and no lighting-specific tool I have looked at does dispatch better. Online booking lets a homeowner pick a slot from your website at 10 p.m., which is when they are looking at the neighbour's lights.
Invoicing and payments are solid. Card processing from 2.59 percent, consumer financing on the invoice, a payments record your bookkeeper can follow, and QuickBooks Online sync from Essentials up. Checklists and photo reports on Essentials give you a before-and-after record for the roof-damage question in March. Recurring service plans on Max can hold a yearly re-install. Review requests go out after the job.
It also has 14 days free with no card, phone support, and an app with a large review base on both stores. For a shop that already sells, quotes and signs its own way, it is a reasonable back office. QuoteIQ's own roundup, which ranks QuoteIQ first, still gives Housecall Pro credit for a dispatching interface that handles multi-crew operations during peak installation weeks. I agree with them on that.
At the number. Housecall Pro's home page lists 16 industries and holiday lighting is not one of them, and it shows.
No mockup. There is no way to show the homeowner lights on their house. You attach a photo to the estimate and describe it in words.
No measurement. Nothing in Housecall Pro tells you the roofline is 148 feet. You measure on site with a wheel or a laser, or guess from the truck, and type the footage into a line item.
No per-foot rate card by run type. The price book is built for flat-rate items: a service call, a part, a labour hour. You can make "roofline per ft" an item and put a quantity on it, and many installers do. But ridge line, peaks, jumps, storeys and the peak premium are each another item you remember to add, and nothing links the quantity to a drawing. Change the design and you re-type.
No seasonal agreement logic. A three-season lease with a declining schedule, a takedown job each January and a renewal touchpoint each September is three years of manual entries. Recurring service plans on Max can repeat a job; they do not know what a takedown is.
Seats cost all year. Essentials includes five users, then $100 a month each; Max includes eight, then $75. A crew of six for a six-week season on Essentials is one extra seat for twelve months, $1,200, on top of $1,788 for the plan. That is the generalist model and it is fair for HVAC. It is expensive for December.
None of this is Housecall Pro doing something wrong. It starts after the number exists. A lighting business makes its money deciding the number.
What does a quote cost to build both ways? A worked example#
Take a two-storey with 120 feet of front roofline, one peak and two jumps, priced for permanent track. Using GlowBid's default rate card (installers set their own; these are the starter numbers a new account opens with): roofline $25 per foot, peak $28 per foot plus a 15 percent peak premium, jumps $12 per foot, a Wi-Fi controller at $250, minimum job $1,500, deposit 30 percent.
Deposit, $1,308, collected through Stripe when the homeowner signs on their phone. In GlowBid the footage came from the drawing on your own photo, scaled from the 16-foot garage door, with a source tag and a confidence level on each run and a note on the quote that photo measurements are confirmed on site. About ten minutes, most of it drawing. Price this house in the free tool and you will see the footage by run.
In Housecall Pro the same quote is five price-book items, four quantities typed from a site measurement or a guess, the peak premium worked out on a calculator, and a photo attached. Twenty minutes if the price book is set up, and the second storey premium is whatever you remembered. The estimate can be signed and paid in Housecall Pro too, which is why many shops keep it.
Keep Housecall Pro for this, use GlowBid for that#
The split that works, if you are not ready to move everything:
Job
Keep in Housecall Pro
Do in GlowBid
Lead comes in
Online booking, customer record
Address search, live Street View preview to recognise the house (never saved or measured)
Quote
Draw on your photo, footage, rate card price, quote PDF, e-signature, Stripe deposit
Agreement
Permanent one-time, seasonal service, or multi-year lease
Schedule and dispatch
Calendar, crew app, on-the-way texts, GPS
Install day
Checklists, photo reports
Balance invoice
Invoice, financing, QuickBooks Online sync
Or GlowBid's invoice with partial payments if you prefer one ledger
Takedown and renewal
Recurring plan or a manual job
A signed lease creates each season's install and takedown jobs
The handoff is manual: quote signed in GlowBid, job created in Housecall Pro with the PDF attached. Two minutes. We do not have an integration and I am not going to pretend one is coming next month. Our Jobber page describes the same split for Jobber shops.
When to replace Housecall Pro with GlowBid Ultimate#
If lighting is the whole business, one tool is simpler than two. GlowBid Ultimate, $699 a year at the founding price ($1,299 regular, $169 a month), adds the crew side: a production board (Signed, Booked, In Progress, Finished), installer assignment, work orders, photo-gated checklists and homeowner sign-off, with crew members never seeing prices or customer details. Pro, at $499 founding, has the pipeline CRM with Takedown and Re-book stages, automated quote follow-up texts and quote-view tracking.
What you give up: QuickBooks Online sync, consumer financing on the invoice, employee GPS, route optimization and online booking. Those are real, and if your bookkeeper lives in the QuickBooks sync, weigh it. What you gain is one place where the drawing, the footage, the price, the agreement, the deposit, the job and the takedown are the same record. Plans are on the pricing page.
What goes wrong running lighting on a generalist tool#
Things I have watched installers do:
A price book full of flat items and no run types. The quote drifts from house to house because nobody remembers the peak premium the same way twice. Write the rate card as per foot by run type first; our permanent pricing guide is the worksheet.
A seat for every seasonal helper. Add users in November, remove them in January, or pay $75 to $100 a month each all year.
Guessing footage from the truck. A generalist estimate has a quantity box and no drawing. Measure from your own photo or on site, add your safety buffer, and confirm before ordering track.
A lease typed as a one-time job. Season two and three never get scheduled and the renewal never goes out. Use a real multi-year agreement; our lease template shows the clauses.
Takedown as an afterthought. If it is not a job on the calendar with a date window, it is a January phone call from an annoyed homeowner.
A photo of the neighbour's house on the estimate. It happens on a phone at dusk. A drawing on the customer's own photo, with the address on it, does not.
If you searched for a ServiceTitan alternative for holiday lighting, the honest answer is that ServiceTitan was never on the shortlist. It does not publish prices and is built for larger multi-trade shops. QuoteIQ's page compiles user-reported costs from review sites; I did not verify those numbers so I will not repeat them. Housecall Pro publishes its prices and has a 14-day trial, which is why it is the generalist an installer actually compares.
Draw one house in the free tool.Roofline measure, no login until export. Set the reference length, draw the runs, read the footage. The measuring guide covers references and foreshortening.
Build the rate card from your price book. Fifteen minutes. Per foot by run type and product line, premiums, add-ons, minimum job, deposit, tax.
Quote the next real lead in GlowBid. Photo, draw, price, send, sign, deposit.
Create the job in Housecall Pro with the signed PDF attached, and dispatch as you always have.
Decide in January whether the production board replaces the second login.
Core is $299 a year at the founding price, with a 7-day trial and no card, a 30-day money-back window, and 100 founding places that lock the price while the subscription stays continuous. Details on the pricing page.
FAQ
Questions installers ask
Can I run a Christmas light business on Housecall Pro alone?
Yes, if you are happy building every quote by hand. Housecall Pro schedules, dispatches, invoices and takes payment well, and it has a 14-day trial with no card. What it does not have is a mockup, a roofline measurement or a per-foot rate card by run type, so the number on the estimate comes from your head or a spreadsheet. Many installers add a quoting layer for that.
How much does Housecall Pro cost for a seasonal crew?
Basic is $59 a month billed yearly ($79 monthly) for one user. Essentials is $149 a month yearly ($189 monthly) for five users, then $100 a month per extra user. Max is $299 a month yearly ($329 monthly) for eight users, then $75 each. Those are the prices on housecallpro.com/pricing on September 7, 2026. A yearly plan is paid through the off-season.
Does Housecall Pro sync with QuickBooks?
Yes, from the Essentials plan up. QuickBooks Online sync is listed on Essentials and Max, not on Basic. If bookkeeping is the reason you keep Housecall Pro, that is a fair reason. GlowBid does not sync with QuickBooks; it produces the quote PDF, the signed agreement and an invoice with a payments ledger, and your bookkeeper works from those.
Is ServiceTitan a better fit for holiday lighting than Housecall Pro?
For almost every lighting installer, no. ServiceTitan does not publish prices and is built for larger multi-trade shops. QuoteIQ's page on it compiles user-reported costs from review sites; we did not verify those figures so we do not repeat them. Housecall Pro publishes its prices and has a 14-day trial, which puts it on a lighting installer's shortlist where ServiceTitan is not.
Can GlowBid send jobs into Housecall Pro?
Not automatically, and we will not claim an integration we have not built. The workflow that works today is manual and short: quote, sign and collect the deposit in GlowBid, then create the job in Housecall Pro with the customer, the date and the signed PDF attached. Two minutes per job. If you move fully to GlowBid Ultimate, the production board replaces that step.
What does GlowBid do that Housecall Pro does not?
It measures and prices from the drawing. You draw the runs on your own photo, roofline, ridge line, peak, jump, ground, tree, and the footage, bill of materials and price come from that geometry through your rate card. It also carries three agreement types including multi-year seasonal leases that create each season's install and takedown jobs. Housecall Pro has none of that; it starts after the number exists.
