I ran Exo-Pro Pressure and Soft Wash on Markate for three years. It functioned well for me. Then I built JobMargin. This page is what I actually think about both tools — from someone who used one, then built the other.
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The honest setup
Markate functioned well for me for three years. I want to start there because I don't think the software was the problem. For forty bucks a month, I got a single-person registration, QuickBooks integration, a working calendar, and the basic CRM a pressure washing business needs — customers, estimates, work orders, invoicing, payments, scheduling. Entry-level tool at an entry-level price. No complaints about what it was.
What I wanted from it — what I eventually left to build — wasn't in Markate, and I don't think it's coming.
To be honest, when I tried to track my indirect costs a couple of times in Markate, it flowed over into QuickBooks weird. I gave up pretty early. From that point on I was running a business without being able to see my real margin on a job. I was quoting from experience and hoping. Every contractor I know is doing the same thing.
That's the gap this page is about. Not whether Markate is "good." Whether what it's built for matches what you actually need.
The differentiator
Every contractor has three numbers on a job: revenue, gross margin, and true margin. Revenue is what you invoiced. Gross margin is what's left after materials and fuel. True margin is what's left after you allocate your real hourly cost — truck insurance, liability, licensing, chemicals, equipment depreciation, workers comp, software, uniforms, credit card interest — all the things that it takes to run your business that come off the top every month whether you worked or not.
Most field service software gives you revenue and stops there.
Markate has features called Job Costing and Cost Estimator. I tried them. What they actually did in my hands was give me a costs section that flowed into QuickBooks in a way I couldn't reconcile. I couldn't make it work, and I moved on.
JobMargin's margin card sits on the estimate screen as I build the quote. I enter services, materials, expected labor hours. The card updates live. I see revenue, gross margin, and true margin after my indirect costs are allocated. Before I click send.
I ran the numbers on my own business last year. It costs me $59.63 per hour of indirect cost to pay myself a living wage and cover all my insurances, loan payments, truck payments, and everything else. If my truck is leaving the driveway, I know it costs me nearly sixty dollars an hour just to operate. Armed with that number, I price differently. I lose jobs I should lose. I win jobs I used to lose by being too aggressive.
I lost a roof job earlier this year because I priced it at $0.40 a square foot. Looking at the numbers now, I could have flexed to $0.20 and still made 35%. I didn't have the margin card in front of me at the time. I would have won the work.
That's the whole reason JobMargin exists. Not a flashier calendar. Not a prettier invoice. A number on the estimate screen that tells you, before you click send, whether the job you just priced will actually pay you. You'd never click send in the blind.
Pricing honestly
Markate is genuinely cheaper than JobMargin at the single-operator level. I'm not going to hide that.
Markate's Owner Operator plan is $39.95/month. JobMargin Starter is $59/month. That's twenty dollars a month less at Markate if you're running solo. Over a year that's $240. Real money, not nothing.
Here's what you're deciding between at that price point:
At $39.95/month, Markate Owner Operator gives you: estimates, invoices, QuickBooks integration, calendar, customer management, jobs pipeline, payment processing, expense tracking, employee management basics, reporting dashboards. The full operational stack for a solo operator.
At $59/month, JobMargin Starter gives you: the same operational stack — estimates, invoices, payments, calendar, customers, QuickBooks sync — plus true margin on every estimate, indirect cost allocation per job, and real margin reporting by customer, service, and month. The margin visibility is what the extra twenty dollars buys.
At team scale, the math shifts. Markate's team pricing is $39.95 base plus $5 per employee per month, with several features available as $10/mo add-ons — customer portal, Zapier, CompanyCam integration, review automation. Five employees on Markate with a few of those add-ons is around $105/mo. JobMargin Pro is $129/mo flat, with five users, customer portal, QuickBooks sync, and the margin engine all included.
At ten employees and the same add-ons, Markate is around $130/month. JobMargin Pro at ten users is $179/month ($129 base + $50 for five additional users). Markate comes out cheaper again.
My honest read: If you want the lowest monthly bill and you don't need margin visibility — Markate is the right tool. If you want to see what you're actually keeping on every job you price — JobMargin is what that's built for. I'm not going to convince you that $20 or $50 a month matters more than pricing correctly. If you already know how to price correctly without the math on screen, Markate is probably fine.
I didn't know how to price correctly without the math on screen. That's why I built this.
Credit where it's due
I used Markate for three years. I'll tell you what it did well before I tell you what I left behind.
The proposal builder is good. Markate let me take portions of my estimates and drop them into formatted multi-page proposals. That was useful for bigger commercial bids. JobMargin doesn't have a proposal builder today — it's on our list, not built yet.
The automated appointment reminders and automated review requests worked. Markate sent them on a schedule. Some contractors will love that. In JobMargin I made those intentional nudges on the dashboard — you send the review request, you don't forget, but it's not firing off automatically without your knowing. That was a deliberate choice, not a missing feature. If you prefer "set it and forget it" automation, Markate's approach is going to feel better to you than mine.
The entry price is competitive. At $39.95/month, Markate is one of the cheapest entries into field service software with QuickBooks sync included. That matters for a contractor starting out.
The feature set is broad. Progressive invoices, recurring work orders, expense reporting, employee time tracking, payroll integration, customer financing, ACH payments, a leaderboard for sales. If you want one tool that does a lot of transactional things competently, Markate does that.
I want to be clear: Markate isn't broken. It's a comprehensive service operations platform that handles the transactional flow well. I'd recommend it to a contractor who wants entry-level CRM that will do estimates to invoicing pretty well at a pretty good price.
Built different
Beyond the margin card, a few things about JobMargin came directly from my frustration with Markate. I'll name them.
Vertical-specific setup, not generic. Markate was built for every industry. The pressure washing version didn't feel different from what lawn care would be. You got tools; you had to figure out which ones applied to your trade. JobMargin preseeds with your services, your consumables, your terms — what I call a business in a box with your DNA on it before you click anything. If you spend half an hour setting it up right from the very beginning, your day-to-day is much more efficient.
One-screen workflow, not page-jumping. In Markate, to schedule a work order I had to leave the estimate page, navigate to the work order page, find the work order, then schedule it. Simple stuff shouldn't take four clicks across three pages. It was just clunky. I didn't like that portion of it. JobMargin keeps customer, estimate, job, and scheduling on the same surface so the flow doesn't break.
Portal included at Pro, not an add-on. Markate charges $10/mo for Fully Branded Customer Portal. Zapier is $10/mo. CompanyCam is $10/mo. Automated Review is $10/mo. Those add up. JobMargin Pro ($129) includes the customer portal. You get a permanent link between you and your customer — service history, photos, rebooking, campaigns — not a transaction that dies when the job does.
QuickBooks on every tier — same as Markate, different from most others. Credit where credit is due: Markate includes QuickBooks at their base plan, same as JobMargin. We're aligned on that one. Jobber gates QB sync at $99. Housecall Pro gates it at $149. QuoteIQ gates it at $149.99. Markate and JobMargin are the outliers, and that's the right call. A small business owner needs good books from day one. I'd rather pay a bookkeeper forty dollars a month to clean up QuickBooks than scrape CSV files at year-end.
Commission and compensation math, not just payroll. If you pay your crew by commission instead of hourly — or some mix — JobMargin Pro handles per-line-item commission rates. This came from a paver sealing contractor who asked me whether my software could handle the 9% he paid on paver work versus the 19% he paid on pressure washing. I hadn't thought about it that way until he asked. Now JobMargin runs the math: three employees on the same job with three different compensation packages, the software calculates it at the end of the week. Markate has payroll reports and payroll integration — solid for hourly crews. This is different math, and it's the math that changes how you run the business if you pay any mix of hourly, commission, and profit share.
Side by side
| JobMargin | Markate | |
|---|---|---|
| Starting price | $59/mo (Starter) | $39.95/mo (Owner Operator) |
| Team entry | $129/mo, 5 users (Pro) | $39.95 + $5/employee |
| True margin on estimate screen | ✓ included | — |
| Indirect cost allocation per job | ✓ included | — |
| QuickBooks sync | ✓ all tiers | ✓ all tiers |
| Customer portal | Included at Pro | $10/mo add-on |
| Crew dispatch (day/week/list) | Pro + add-on or Enterprise | Scheduling only |
| Commission engine (line-item) | ✓ Pro | — |
| Campaign / marketing | Enterprise included | Several $10/mo add-ons |
| Proposal builder | — | ✓ included |
| Automated review requests | Dashboard nudge | ✓ $10/mo add-on |
| Recurring services | ✓ all billing types | ✓ included |
| Vertical-specific setup | ✓ by trade | Generic |
The decision
Choose Markate if: you're running a solo pressure washing, lawn care, or home service business; you want the lowest monthly cost with QuickBooks included; you're comfortable pricing from experience without live margin math on screen; and you prefer automatic review requests and appointment reminders that fire on schedule. Markate's Owner Operator plan at $39.95/month is a legitimate entry point for a contractor who wants transactional CRM and isn't trying to solve the margin visibility problem.
Choose JobMargin if: you want to see true margin on every estimate before you click send; you want indirect cost allocation built in so you know what a job actually keeps after the cost of running your truck, your insurance, your licensing, and everything else that takes money off the top; you want a vertical-specific setup that comes preseeded with your trade's services instead of a generic toolkit; and you want a tool designed around how a legitimate small business actually runs, not around a fee structure that nickel-and-dimes features as add-ons.
Both tools work. They're built for different problems. I spent three years solving the wrong problem. That's not a knock on Markate — it's a statement about what I needed that it wasn't designed to give me.
FAQ
Yes. Markate functioned well for me for three years. For forty bucks a month I got a single-person registration, QuickBooks integration, and a working CRM. It did what it was built to do. What I needed — real margin visibility, indirect cost tracking that didn't break my books — wasn't what it was built to do.
That's what most contractors I know do. It works until it doesn't. I was running a pressure washing business, a BNI chapter, and trying to grow. A spreadsheet that only I could maintain, that nobody else on my team could see or update, wasn't scaling. The margin card on the estimate screen is where the data lives in JobMargin because that's where the decision happens.
No. I built it for pressure washing first because that's what I know. Every feature comes from a real job I actually ran, or a contractor in a different trade who asked me a specific question. Car detailing, painting, lawn care, paver sealing, and paver/concrete are live today. Small engine repair, cleaning, and training are next. The platform is vertical-specific by design — each trade gets its own preseeded services, consumables, and terms.
You can export your customer list and job history from Markate and import it into JobMargin. Dedicated migration help is included for Pro and Enterprise accounts. We'll help you map the data so you don't start from zero.
Yes. I mean that. For a solo operator who wants the lowest monthly cost and a complete transactional stack with QuickBooks, Markate is a legitimate choice. If your business is priced by feel and you're not trying to see margin math on the screen before you send the estimate, Markate will probably do what you need it to do. I'm not here to talk anyone out of it. I'm here to tell you why I built what I built.
No. The fourteen-day free trial requires no credit card. You can import a customer list, build an estimate, and see your real margin number before you commit to anything.
At five employees with the add-ons most contractors want (customer portal, review automation, integrations), Markate is around $105/month total. JobMargin Pro is $129/month flat with those things included. At ten employees, the math flips — Markate is around $130/month, JobMargin Pro with five extra users is $179/month, and JobMargin Enterprise at $199/month includes unlimited users. Above ten users, JobMargin Enterprise wins on price. Below ten, Markate is cheaper.
If you're a contractor who's been running on Markate and wondering whether the tool you're using is actually showing you what you're keeping on each job — it probably isn't. That's not a knock on Markate. It's a statement about what field service software in this category was built to do, and what it wasn't.
I built JobMargin because I wanted to know. Fourteen days free, no credit card. Try one estimate against your real numbers and see what it tells you.