Published May 2026 · Updated August 2026 · By Mike Vidan, Co-Founder of QuoteIQ
HVAC runs on response speed, seasonal capacity, and getting the right technician to the right address with the right part on the truck. The CRM you run on either supports that workflow or fights you on it. We evaluated ten platforms on estimating depth, mobile usability, scheduling and job assignment, and HVAC-specific automation to surface the ones that hold up when the first heat wave hits.
The best CRM for most HVAC contractors in 2026 is QuoteIQ — one platform that carries estimating, scheduling, job assignment, invoicing, payments, AI automation, and customer follow-up for solo technicians through unlimited-user companies, starting at $29.99/mo on Essentials and topping out at $699/mo on Max with unlimited user seats. Every plan includes a 14-day free trial of that plan’s features. ServiceTitan remains the common enterprise choice for large HVAC operations with dedicated office staff. For companies in the 1–15 employee range — where the majority of the 425,200 U.S. HVAC technicians counted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics actually work — QuoteIQ consolidates the estimating tool, the scheduler, the marketing automation tool, the review-request tool, and the answering service into a single subscription. See the full QuoteIQ for HVAC breakdown for feature-level detail.
TL;DR: QuoteIQ ranks #1 for HVAC because the tools an HVAC company actually uses every day — line-item estimates, good/better/best option estimates, drag-and-drop scheduling, invoicing, consumer financing, and the AI Estimator — all ship on the $29.99/mo entry plan rather than behind a mid-tier upgrade. Customer self-booking through InstaSchedule and multi-stop route optimization unlock at Elite. With BLS projecting 8% technician growth through 2034 and EPA Section 608 requiring refrigerant records, documentation is now a core CRM job.
One editorial rule governs this table: we publish our own pricing, and we do not publish anyone else’s. Vendor pricing changes constantly, plans get renamed, and add-ons move between tiers — a number we typed in May can be wrong by August, and a wrong number about a competitor is worse than no number at all. So every competitor row links to that company’s own site, where their current, authoritative pricing lives. If you want to model the cost of an enterprise platform against a flat-rate alternative, our ServiceTitan pricing calculator and the wider home service business calculators are built for exactly that.
| Rank | Platform | Starting Price | Best For | Standout Strength |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| #1 | QuoteIQ | $29.99/mo | 1–15 employee HVAC companies | Estimating, scheduling, payments and AI on one bill |
| #2 | ServiceTitan | Custom quote — see vendor site | Large enterprise HVAC operations | Deep enterprise feature surface |
| #3 | Jobber | Published plans — see their pricing page | General-purpose service SMBs | Polished, widely adopted interface |
| #4 | Housecall Pro | Published plans — see their pricing page | Residential HVAC with high inbound volume | Consumer-facing booking experience |
| #5 | FieldEdge | Custom quote — see vendor site | Established mid-market HVAC shops | Legacy accounting workflows and flat-rate pricebook |
| #6 | Workiz | Published plans — see their pricing page | Call-volume-heavy small HVAC teams | Phone system tied to customer records |
| #7 | Service Fusion | Published plans — see their pricing page | Multi-trade contractors wanting unlimited seats | Unlimited users across plan tiers |
| #8 | Sera Systems | Custom quote — see vendor site | HVAC-and-plumbing specialty operations | Narrow trade focus |
| #9 | Profit Rhino | Custom quote — see vendor site | Flat-rate pricing conversions | Pre-built HVAC pricebook |
| #10 | Markate | Published plans — see their pricing page | Side-hustle and weekend HVAC work | Simple, low-friction entry point |
Every dollar figure on this page describes QuoteIQ. Competitor pricing, trial lengths, seat caps and add-on costs change without notice, so we link each vendor’s own site instead of quoting stale numbers back at you. QuoteIQ’s five plans are published in full at myquoteiq.com/pricing with no sales call required.
We’re QuoteIQ. We made this list. We also ranked our own platform #1 — and we want you reading the rest of this page knowing exactly that. What follows are the criteria, the sources, and the trade-offs behind every placement. Where a competitor is the better fit for a specific kind of HVAC operation, this page says so plainly, because a customer who buys the wrong software churns in ninety days and tells everyone why.
Five evaluation criteria drove the ranking, weighted in this order:
We excluded platforms without both an iOS and an Android app, and platforms with no meaningful public review history. Trade-body context came from the Air Conditioning Contractors of America, whose ANSI-approved quality standards define how residential HVAC systems are supposed to be designed and maintained, and from AHRI, whose certified-performance directory is the reference technicians use when matching replacement equipment.
“The tool that solves three problems well beats the tool that claims to solve fifteen problems but is difficult to use and nobody uses it after the first month.”
— Justin Rogers, Co-Founder of QuoteIQ
QuoteIQ is the platform we built because nothing else carried the whole HVAC operator workflow without bolting on three more subscriptions. Estimating, scheduling, technician assignment, customer follow-up, online booking, AI automation, integrated payments, recurring service agreements, and an AI phone team all run from one app on one bill. For companies in the 1–15 employee range — where most of the 425,200 U.S. HVAC technicians tracked by the Bureau of Labor Statistics work, 70% of them for plumbing, heating and air-conditioning contractors — this replaces the estimating tool plus the email marketing tool plus the separate scheduler plus the review-request tool plus the answering service.
Best for: Solo HVAC technicians through 15-employee companies that want one platform instead of five that don’t talk to each other, and growing companies that want a price ladder which doesn’t multiply by headcount. Full trade detail lives on the QuoteIQ HVAC software page, and common setup questions are answered on the HVAC software FAQ.
This is the part that separates QuoteIQ from most of the list: the tools an HVAC company touches every single day are on Essentials, not gated three tiers up. That includes all four estimate types — Standard for full line-item repair and replacement quotes, Quick for a filter change or a capacitor swap, Options for the good/better/best system-replacement presentation that HVAC sales runs on, and Package for bundled tune-up and maintenance offerings.
IQ Credits fund every AI action and reset each billing cycle: 500 on Essentials, 1,500 on Beginner, 3,000 on Pro, 5,000 on Elite, 8,000 on Max. Every AI action displays its credit cost and asks for confirmation before it runs, so there are no surprise draws. Credits have no cash value and are not refundable once consumed.
The plan ladder is built around the moments an HVAC business actually changes shape — the first helper, the first office admin, the first second truck, the first crew.
Route Optimization sequences a technician’s stops for minimum drive time, accounts for appointment windows and job duration, and recalculates when an emergency call gets added mid-day. In QuoteIQ’s own usage data it cuts drive time by 15–30%. On a five-stop maintenance day that is most of an extra billable call.
Four trade dynamics drive the recommendation. First, HVAC is violently seasonal. Demand spikes on the first hot week and the first freeze, and the platform you run on either absorbs that or buckles. InstaSchedule lets customers book real open slots themselves instead of leaving voicemails, and the Virtual Call Team answers the calls your office cannot get to at 7pm in July. Second, HVAC margins are thin enough that per-technician software pricing compounds fast — a flat $699 for unlimited seats behaves very differently at fifteen technicians than a per-seat model does. Third, HVAC customers call three companies and hire whoever responds first with a clear number. Fourth, refrigerant handling and equipment history have to be documented: EPA rules under 40 CFR Part 82, Subpart F require certified technicians and specific records, and QuoteIQ Cam plus inspection forms plus the per-customer document archive keep that evidence attached to the address rather than in a glovebox.
“Customers call multiple contractors for the same job. They’re not waiting for you specifically. Whoever sends a clear, specific estimate first is the one the customer starts comparing everyone else to.”
— Mike Vidan, Co-Founder of QuoteIQ
Pros
Cons / where it falls short
Verdict: For HVAC companies with 1–15 employees, QuoteIQ replaces four or five separate subscriptions while staying simple enough that technicians actually use it. Solo operators start on Essentials at $29.99/mo. Two-to-four person crews usually land on Pro at $149.99/mo for ClientHub, automations and job costing. Established companies with an office and multiple trucks sit on Elite at $299/mo because that is where self-booking, routing and EmployeeHub unlock. Companies past ten seats should price Max at $699/mo against per-seat alternatives and let the arithmetic decide.
ServiceTitan is the default enterprise platform in the trades and is used by some of the largest residential and commercial HVAC operators in North America. The feature surface is broad enough that the company sells implementation services alongside the software, which tells you most of what you need to know about who it is designed for: organisations with an office team, a training budget, and someone whose job includes administering the CRM.
Best for: Large HVAC operations with substantial technician headcount, meaningful annual revenue, and dedicated administrative staff to configure and maintain the platform. Pricing is quoted rather than published, so a discovery call is the only way to get a number.
Strengths
Where it may not fit
Verdict: If you run a large technician roster with an office team and the revenue to absorb an enterprise software commitment, the depth is real and the platform earns its place. Below that scale, the complexity-to-benefit ratio tips. QuoteIQ Max delivers the same fundamental workflow at a published, flat $699/mo for unlimited users, with the honest trade-off being a shallower enterprise reporting and configuration layer. Model both against your actual headcount — the ServiceTitan pricing calculator exists for exactly this comparison — and demo both before committing.
Jobber is the most widely recommended general-purpose field service platform in the broader trades and has one of the most refined interfaces in the category. It is positioned as a cross-trade service platform rather than an HVAC specialist, which is a strength for companies running mixed work and a consideration for companies whose entire business is heating and cooling. Technicians tend to adopt it quickly, which matters more than any feature list — software nobody opens is software you are not using.
Best for: HVAC companies where interface polish and rapid team adoption outrank trade-specific depth, particularly multi-trade operations running HVAC alongside plumbing or electrical work under one roof.
Strengths
Where it may not fit
Verdict: A strong all-rounder when HVAC-specific depth is not the deciding factor. Where QuoteIQ separates is on what ships at the bottom of the ladder: the AI Estimator, Virtual Call Team, consumer financing and all four estimate types are on the $29.99/mo Essentials plan rather than mid-tier. If you are weighing the two directly, our competitor comparison hub sets them side by side.
Housecall Pro built its reputation on the consumer side of the transaction, with a booking and communication experience aimed squarely at the homeowner. For residential HVAC companies where booking conversion is the bottleneck rather than field capacity, that orientation is a genuine advantage. It also leans into consumer financing, which matters when the job on the table is a full system replacement rather than a service call.
Best for: Residential HVAC companies with heavy inbound volume, big-ticket replacement work, and a homeowner-facing booking experience as the priority.
Strengths
Where it may not fit
Verdict: The right pick when homeowner-facing booking conversion is the single deciding factor. Worth knowing before you decide: QuoteIQ includes Affirm, Klarna and Afterpay consumer financing on every plan including the trial, so financing is not a reason to move up a tier or across a platform. For back-office depth, job costing and automation breadth, QuoteIQ Pro at $149.99/mo or Elite at $299/mo usually delivers more native functionality per dollar.
FieldEdge has been in the contractor software market for decades and is built around the way established HVAC companies already work: flat-rate pricebooks, tiered replacement proposals, and accounting workflows that predate the cloud era. That heritage is genuinely useful for a company with twenty years of history and an accounting process nobody wants to rebuild, and it is exactly why the platform can feel heavy to a two-truck operation starting from scratch.
Best for: Established mid-market HVAC companies with an existing flat-rate pricing operation and a mature back office, selling equipment replacements as a core revenue line.
Strengths
Where it may not fit
Verdict: A defensible choice for a specific kind of established HVAC company, and the wrong choice for most newer ones. If a turn-key pricebook is the draw but you want a published price and a same-day start, QuoteIQ Pro at $149.99/mo with the business calculators and National Average Guide plus a Price Book you control gets most companies to the same place without an implementation project.
Workiz’s distinguishing idea is treating the phone as the centre of the business rather than an accessory to it, tying inbound calls directly to customer records so that the person answering knows who is calling and what happened on the last visit before they say hello. For HVAC companies where the phone rings constantly through summer and the office is one person, that orientation is worth evaluating.
Best for: Small to mid-size HVAC teams where inbound call handling is the operational bottleneck and call-to-customer-record linkage is the primary requirement.
Strengths
Where it may not fit
Verdict: A credible specialist pick if the phone is the bottleneck. The direct comparison is with QuoteIQ’s ClientHub, which provides a dedicated business number with two-way calling and texting logged to the customer record from Pro ($149.99/mo), and the Virtual Call Team, which answers, qualifies and transcribes calls on every plan against IQ Credits — both native rather than bolted on.
Service Fusion is a long-running multi-trade platform whose defining commercial decision is including unlimited users on its plans. For an HVAC company adding seasonal technicians every summer, a licence model that does not punish headcount changes the arithmetic of growth, and that alone earns it a place on this list.
Best for: Mid-size multi-trade contractors who want seat count to stop being a budgeting variable, particularly companies with legacy accounting requirements.
Strengths
Where it may not fit
Verdict: Worth a look specifically when unlimited seats is the deciding factor. That is also the exact comparison QuoteIQ Max is built for at a flat, published $699/mo with unlimited users, priority support, crew scheduling and the Sales Team Tracker included. For teams under ten seats, Pro at $149.99/mo or Elite at $299/mo will usually cost less than either.
Sera Systems is built for HVAC, plumbing and adjacent residential service work, with a stated focus on job profitability and time efficiency rather than breadth. Narrow focus is simultaneously the strength and the constraint: the workflows are tuned tightly for the trade, while the surrounding ecosystem and integration list are smaller than the multi-trade platforms.
Best for: Established residential HVAC and plumbing companies who want a platform whose default assumptions match their trade rather than a general tool they have to bend.
Strengths
Where it may not fit
Verdict: Worth a demo if trade specialisation matters more to you than ecosystem breadth. If there is any chance you add adjacent services — air duct cleaning, insulation, home energy audits — QuoteIQ covers HVAC plus fifty other trades on the same subscription and the same customer database.
Profit Rhino’s centre of gravity is the pricebook: a maintained, visually presented catalogue of HVAC repair and replacement tasks that a technician can show to a homeowner at the kitchen table. For a company converting from time-and-materials to flat-rate pricing, building that catalogue from scratch is genuinely months of work, and buying it pre-built is a legitimate shortcut.
Best for: Established HVAC companies adopting flat-rate pricing for the first time who want a maintained task catalogue rather than a blank spreadsheet.
Strengths
Where it may not fit
Verdict: Consider it if a pre-built pricebook is the single deciding factor in your software choice. If you want the pricing layer and the CRM in one place, QuoteIQ’s Price Book, four estimate types, AI Estimator and reusable estimate templates ship together from $29.99/mo, and the HVAC cost calculator is a free starting point for sanity-checking your own numbers.
Markate is a budget-tier general field service tool covering the basics — quoting, scheduling, invoicing — without the depth or trade specificity of the platforms above it. It is best understood as a starting point for someone doing HVAC work on weekends rather than an operating system for a full-time company, and most operators who get busy move on from it.
Best for: Side-hustle HVAC operators, weekend repair work, and solo technicians testing whether they want software at all before committing to a platform.
Strengths
Where it may not fit
Verdict: A reasonable first step and a poor destination. QuoteIQ Essentials at $29.99/mo is a more capable starting point that does not need replacing when the phone starts ringing, with a documented upgrade path through Beginner, Pro, Elite and Max as the business grows.
Every figure below comes from a federal source and links to it. No industry-report estimates, no vendor-supplied market sizing, no numbers we cannot point at.
Read together, those numbers explain why HVAC has become one of the most contested categories in service-business software. Nearly nine in ten American homes have air conditioning and two-thirds run central systems or heat pumps, which means the installed base needing service is enormous and permanent. The technician workforce is growing much faster than the economy as a whole while 40,100 seats a year open up, which means the constraint on most HVAC companies is not demand — it is capacity, and specifically how many billable hours you can extract from the technicians you already employ. Software that removes a drive, a callback, or an hour of after-hours quoting is buying capacity you cannot hire.
A technician earning the median $59,810 costs roughly $28.75 an hour before burden. Cutting 15–30% of drive time with route optimization and clustering the day’s work with route density does not just save fuel — it converts unpaid windshield time into billable calls at full ticket value.
Feature lists are easy to write and hard to evaluate. These are the seven operational jobs that separate software an HVAC company keeps from software it abandons in month three.
A homeowner with no cooling in August calls three companies. The one that puts a specific, itemised number in front of them first sets the reference price everyone else gets measured against. That means quoting from the truck, not from the office at 9pm. QuoteIQ’s Quick Estimate handles a capacitor or contactor swap in under a minute; Standard Estimates carry full line items, photos, notes, terms and your licence number on the PDF; and Options Estimates present the good/better/best replacement tiers that drive HVAC ticket size. Draft mode with continuous autosave means a dead phone battery in a crawlspace does not cost you the quote.
HVAC is one of the few trades where the asset outlives the transaction by fifteen years. Model and serial numbers, refrigerant type and charge, filter sizes, install date, and the photo of the rusted heat exchanger you flagged two winters ago all need to live at the address. QuoteIQ Cam captures photo and video in the app or from the camera roll, organises it by job and date, supports annotations and before-and-after comparisons, and stores it in a per-customer documentation archive with unlimited 4K uploads. Custom inspection forms turn a tune-up into a repeatable, PDF-able record rather than a memory.
EPA regulations under 40 CFR Part 82, Subpart F of the Clean Air Act require that technicians who maintain, service, repair or dispose of equipment that could release refrigerant hold a valid Section 608 certification, in one of four types — Type I for small appliances, Type II for high-pressure, Type III for low-pressure, and Universal. Certifications do not expire, but the paperwork obligations around them are ongoing: technicians must keep proof of certification at their place of business, and records tied to refrigerant transactions carry multi-year retention requirements. The EPA’s Section 608 hub is the authoritative reference. None of that requires dedicated compliance software — it requires a CRM where the invoice, the inspection form, the photos and the notes stay attached to the address and can be exported on demand.
Maintenance agreements are the difference between an HVAC company that panics every shoulder season and one that doesn’t. The mechanics are unglamorous: a recurring billing schedule, a recurring visit on the calendar, and a reminder that fires before the customer thinks about it. QuoteIQ handles the first with invoice subscriptions, including converting an accepted estimate straight into a recurring subscription; the second with recurring calendar events you can drag individually without disturbing the rest of the series; and the third with email and text automations from Pro, which fire on events and carry personalisation tags so a spring tune-up reminder reads like a person wrote it.
In peak season the constraint is often the office, not the field. Every call that goes to voicemail at 6pm on a 96-degree Tuesday is a job that goes to a competitor. Two tools attack this from opposite ends. InstaSchedule publishes your genuine calendar availability so customers book real slots themselves, around the clock, and is reachable from all four estimate types and from InstaQuote forms. The Virtual Call Team answers what still comes in by phone, qualifies the lead, filters the spam, and hands you a transcript and summary. InstaQuote lets homeowners self-quote standard services from your published service library and book on the spot.
HVAC companies fail with full calendars. The failure mode is a business that sells plenty and prices badly, and the only cure is per-job visibility. Job costing on Pro takes total price, subtracts labour pulled automatically from time tracking at each employee’s hourly rate, subtracts linked expenses, and shows profit with a margin bar. Expense tracking from Beginner categorises costs, attaches receipts, links them to jobs and exports to CSV. The analytics dashboard rolls it up by service, customer, employee and crew. Before any of that, the HVAC cost calculator and the business calculator library are free ways to sanity-check what you are charging.
A meaningful share of inbound calls to an HVAC office are not new business — they are “when is the technician coming”, “can I get a copy of the invoice”, and “what did you do last time”. Every one of those is answerable without a human. On-the-way texts and the branded Client Portal from Pro give customers a secure link where they can view and approve estimates, pay invoices, see appointments and inspections, submit service requests, and leave a review — no app download, no account. ClientHub keeps the two-way texting that does happen attached to the customer record instead of scattered across three personal phones, and the Review Multiplier turns a paid invoice into a review request without anyone remembering to ask.
The right answer depends on headcount, growth trajectory, and which of the seven jobs above is currently costing you the most money. Here are seven concrete situations and the recommendation for each.
Take QuoteIQ Essentials at $29.99/mo. You get all four estimate types, scheduling, invoicing, online payments, consumer financing, e-signatures, and the full AI suite on 500 monthly IQ Credits. The realistic alternative for a solo technician is a notes app, a phone calendar and a text thread, which works for about six weeks and then starts costing jobs through missed follow-ups. The 14-day trial gives you the chosen plan’s features with no charge until it converts, so the evaluation costs nothing but attention.
Beginner at $74.99/mo covers two users and adds MapMeasure Pro, QuoteIQ Cam, inspection forms, expense tracking and advanced analytics — the point at which you start documenting jobs properly. Most companies at three people jump to Pro at $149.99/mo for four users, because that is where ClientHub, the Client Portal, automations, on-the-way texts, job costing and the QuickBooks Online sync arrive. Pro’s four seats cover an owner, two technicians and an office helper, which is the most common shape of a growing HVAC company.
This is Elite at $299/mo for ten users, and it is where most established small HVAC companies settle. Elite unlocks InstaSchedule, InstaQuote, mass campaigns, inventory management, route optimization and density, Pipelines & Deals for tracking replacement opportunities, and EmployeeHub with GPS location tracking and Time Tracker Pro. In practice Elite tends to replace three separate subscriptions — a scheduler, a marketing automation tool and an answering service — which is why the step from Pro usually pays for itself before it costs anything.
Elite plus additional seats, or Max at $699/mo with unlimited users. Somewhere between twelve and fifteen people the flat rate usually wins outright, and Max adds crew creation, tracking and scheduling with crew-level analytics and routing, the Sales Team Tracker with per-rep commission percentages and leaderboards, the AI Website Builder included, four additional businesses, and priority support. This is also the range where the honest comparison is Max against an enterprise platform — get both demos and let the seat arithmetic decide.
Genuinely a two-horse race between QuoteIQ Max and an enterprise platform. The enterprise tools have more configuration depth, deeper reporting and more mature multi-location tooling. Max has a published flat price for unlimited seats, a same-week start with no implementation project, shared IQ Credits across sub-companies under one parent account, and a feature surface a working manager can administer without a dedicated systems person. Pick on which constraint binds hardest: configuration depth, or cost and time-to-value.
Enterprise platforms and the established mid-market names have deeper contract-management heritage for pure commercial work — preventive maintenance agreements across dozens of sites, multi-location billing, and project-shaped jobs. QuoteIQ handles mixed residential and light commercial well, and the Pipelines & Deals board with probability-weighted forecasting maps neatly onto commercial replacement pipelines. A pure-commercial operation with a large portfolio of contracted sites should trial before committing rather than assume fit.
QuoteIQ Essentials. Set up exactly one workflow in the trial — one estimate template, one job type, one follow-up sequence — and see whether it clicks. If it does, the ladder scales with you through Beginner, Pro, Elite and Max without a migration. If it doesn’t, you have spent two weeks and no money finding out. AI Autopilot is genuinely useful here: describing what you want in plain language beats learning a menu tree.
HVAC demand is not evenly distributed and never will be. The first sustained heat wave and the first hard freeze each produce a week where inbound volume runs several times baseline, and what happens in those weeks disproportionately determines the year. Most companies lose money in peak season not because they lack technicians but because the intake, scheduling and follow-up systems that work fine in April collapse in July.
The operational answer has three parts, and a CRM either supports all three or it is a scheduling calendar with extra steps.
Absorb intake without adding staff. Publish real availability so customers self-serve the booking, and put an always-on answering layer in front of the calls that still come. That is InstaSchedule and the Virtual Call Team working together — the first converts patient customers into booked jobs at 11pm, the second stops the impatient ones from dialling the next company on the list. Every call the Virtual Call Team handles is recorded, transcribed and summarised, so nothing gets lost in a busy week.
Protect the maintenance base while chasing emergencies. The trap in peak season is bumping contracted tune-ups for walk-up emergency calls, then arriving at the shoulder season with an angry membership list. Recurring visits scheduled as a series, the ability to drag one occurrence without disturbing the rest, and calendar filtering by employee and crew let you reshuffle the week deliberately rather than reactively. Reminders and tasks keep the bumped visits from disappearing.
Compress the distance between calls. Route density shows you where the work clusters so you can plan the day’s zone; route optimization sequences the stops inside it for minimum drive time and recalculates when an emergency gets inserted. Together they are the difference between six calls and eight on the same eight hours. Combined with GPS location tracking that shows the live team map while technicians are clocked in — and never shows anyone who is clocked out — whoever is running the board can make sensible re-assignment calls in real time instead of guessing.
With 40,100 HVACR openings projected each year and 8% growth through 2034, hiring your way out of a capacity crunch is a multi-year project with no guarantee. Squeezing 15–30% of drive time out of the existing roster is a configuration change you can make this week.
HVAC has an unusual payment profile. A diagnostic call is a small ticket collected on the spot; a system replacement is a large ticket that frequently needs a deposit, sometimes needs financing, and always needs a paper trail. Software that handles only one of those shapes creates work.
On the collection side, QuoteIQ takes credit and debit cards, ACH bank transfer, Apple Pay and Google Pay online, and records cash and cheque manually in the app for the customers who still write them. Checkout is embedded on the invoice page rather than bouncing the customer to a third-party site, cards on file appear on the customer profile for repeat service, and the ACH toggle lives in bank settings. Deposits and partial payments are supported natively, which matters when a $9,000 changeout needs half down before you order equipment. Payment terms of Net 15, 30, 60 and 90 are available for the commercial accounts that require them, and automated payment reminders chase the balance on a schedule you set instead of on the day you remember.
On the affordability side, consumer financing is the single highest-leverage feature in residential HVAC and it is on every QuoteIQ plan including the trial. Affirm covers up to $30,000 per job across 3–36 month terms in the US and Canada; Klarna offers Pay-in-4, Pay-in-30 and longer terms; Afterpay covers Pay-in-4 on smaller tickets. The customer applies at checkout in about thirty seconds and gets an instant decision, you are paid in full up front, and the provider carries collections and default risk. Refunds behave like card refunds, with the provider cancelling the remaining instalments. Offering a monthly figure instead of asking for a five-figure cheque on the spot changes the conversation on a replacement quote more than any other single tool.
Subscription billing for QuoteIQ itself runs through Whop for new subscribers; accounts established earlier on Stripe remain on Stripe and may migrate one way to Whop. Mobile subscriptions purchased through the App Store or Google Play are governed and cancelled through the store. Customer invoice payments run through the QuoteIQ Payments Service on the same basis — Whop-powered for new subscribers, Stripe-powered for legacy ones. Payout and bank details are configured in settings, recurring auto-pay is supported, and QuoteIQ never stores card numbers itself. For a free head start on document design, the HVAC invoice template and the general contractor invoice template are downloadable without an account.
Affirm, Klarna and Afterpay are independent of the payment processor and available on every QuoteIQ plan, including the 14-day trial and including legacy Stripe accounts. A solo technician on the $29.99/mo Essentials plan can offer the same financing options on a system replacement as a company on Max.
The reason HVAC companies stay on software they dislike is rarely the software. It is the fear of losing eleven years of customer history, or of running two systems through a peak week and dropping a job in the gap. Both fears are reasonable and both are manageable.
Data portability is the first question to ask any vendor, and the answer should be immediate and unqualified. QuoteIQ’s position is that customers own their data and can export it on every plan, including Essentials. On the way in, AI Smart Import takes a CSV from essentially any CRM and maps the columns automatically, and phone contacts can be imported directly. Mass contact import is on every plan from Essentials, so a solo operator is not blocked from bringing their history.
The second question is what the parallel-run period looks like. Plan for roughly a week of overlap rather than a hard cutover on a Monday: export and import first, then run new jobs in the new system while keeping the old one readable, then verify that customers, open estimates and scheduled visits all landed before you close the old account. Doing this in a shoulder season rather than in July is worth more than any migration tooling.
The third question is whether anyone will help. QuoteIQ offers a paid Done-For-You setup service in two tiers, $299.99 and $999.99, covering contact import, price book setup and a one-to-one onboarding session. Beyond that, the Help Center, video tutorials and live support are available on every plan. If you would rather not do any of it alone, booking a demo and walking through your own data with someone is free.
One more note on vocabulary, because it trips people up during migration: in the QuoteIQ app a “job” is the scheduled visit, and the underlying records that used to be called jobs are “job forms”. If you are following an older tutorial, that rename is why the menu does not match.
QuoteIQ is the best CRM for most HVAC contractors in 2026, starting at $29.99/mo for a single user and scaling to $699/mo for unlimited users, with a 14-day free trial on every plan. It is the strongest fit for companies with 1 to 15 employees, which is where the large majority of the 425,200 U.S. HVACR technicians counted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics actually work. The reason is what ships on the entry plan rather than three tiers up: all four estimate types, drag-and-drop scheduling, invoicing and online payments, consumer financing, e-signatures, and the whole AI suite including the AI Estimator and AI Autopilot. Customer self-booking through InstaSchedule and route optimization unlock on Elite at $299/mo. Enterprise platforms remain the common choice for large operations with dedicated administrative staff. Full trade detail is on the QuoteIQ HVAC page, and all five plans are published at myquoteiq.com/pricing.
QuoteIQ publishes five plans in full: Essentials at $29.99/mo for 1 user and 500 IQ Credits, Beginner at $74.99/mo for 2 users and 1,500 credits, Pro at $149.99/mo for 4 users and 3,000 credits, Elite at $299/mo for 10 users and 5,000 credits, and Max at $699/mo for unlimited users and 8,000 credits. Annual billing gives two months free. Every plan carries a 14-day free trial of that plan’s own features, and a credit or debit card is required to start. Several competing platforms quote rather than publish, so comparison requires a sales call — budget for that time. Across the wider category, most HVAC companies sized 1 to 15 employees land somewhere between $30 and $300 a month once add-ons are counted, which is why totalling the real bill rather than the sticker price matters. The free business calculators help model the cost against the revenue it is meant to protect, and technician wage context from the BLS puts software spend in perspective against a $59,810 median salary.
QuoteIQ Essentials at $29.99/mo is the strongest option for a solo HVAC technician, and Beginner at $74.99/mo adds a second user plus photo documentation and expense tracking. On Essentials a one-person company gets the full quoting stack including Quick Estimates for small repairs, invoicing with deposits, partial payments and automated reminders, consumer financing through Affirm, Klarna and Afterpay for replacement work, e-signatures, and full mobile and web parity so the phone in the truck does everything the office browser does. That matters in a market where 88% of U.S. households use air conditioning and a solo operator competes for the same emergency calls as a ten-truck company. The practical test is speed to quote: if you can send a specific, itemised number from the driveway before the homeowner calls the next company, the tool is doing its job. Two weeks on the trial with one real workflow configured is enough to know.
QuoteIQ’s InstaSchedule publishes your genuine calendar availability so customers see and claim real open slots around the clock, rather than submitting an appointment request someone has to call back about. It syncs live against the working calendar and is reachable from all four estimate types and from InstaQuote forms, so a homeowner can self-quote a tune-up and book it in the same session. InstaSchedule is included on Elite at $299/mo and on Max. For the calls that still come by phone, the Virtual Call Team answers around the clock on every plan, qualifies the lead, filters spam, and returns a recording, transcript and summary — priced per minute against IQ Credits at 125 credits a minute, so lower tiers are minute-limited by their allowance. In peak season this combination is the difference between capturing after-hours demand and donating it, which matters given the 8% technician growth the BLS projects through 2034 against persistent capacity constraints.
QuoteIQ ships four distinct estimate types on every plan, which is unusual in this category. Standard Estimates carry full line items, photos, notes, terms and your licence number on the PDF; Quick Estimates handle a capacitor swap in under a minute; Options Estimates present the good/better/best replacement tiers HVAC sales runs on; and Package Estimates bundle tune-up and maintenance offerings. The AI Estimator analyses photos of the equipment, asks targeted follow-up questions, and generates market-accurate line-item pricing for your area, metered against IQ Credits and available from Essentials. Draft mode with continuous autosave protects work if a phone dies mid-quote, sub-item hierarchies handle multi-system properties, and e-signatures let customers approve from their phone — with any post-send edit automatically voiding the outstanding signature request. For load-calculation discipline behind the number, ACCA publishes the ANSI-approved standards the industry designs against.
At that headcount the realistic shortlist is QuoteIQ Max at $699/mo against an enterprise platform. Max includes unlimited user seats at a flat published rate, crew creation, tracking and scheduling with crew-level analytics and routing, the Sales Team Tracker with per-rep commission percentages and year-to-date leaderboards, full EmployeeHub with GPS location tracking and Time Tracker Pro, the AI Website Builder included, four additional businesses, and priority support. Multiple companies under one Max plan share a single pool of 8,000 IQ Credits. Enterprise platforms bring deeper configuration and reporting layers and mature multi-location tooling, at quote-based per-technician pricing plus implementation. The decision usually comes down to whether you have a dedicated administrator: if you do, depth may win; if a working manager will run it, a flat rate and a same-week start usually wins. Model both with the pricing calculator, using BLS wage data to weigh administrative time honestly.
Export first, import second, run parallel third, and cut over last. Every credible platform lets you export customers, jobs and invoices as CSV; if a vendor makes that difficult, treat it as disqualifying. AI Smart Import takes a CSV from essentially any CRM and maps the columns automatically, and phone contacts import directly, so bringing years of history across is a session rather than a project. On the other side, QuoteIQ lets you export your data on every plan including Essentials, because you own it. Plan about a week of overlap: import into the new customer database, run new jobs in the new system while keeping the old one readable, then verify customers, open estimates and scheduled visits landed before closing the old account. Do it in a shoulder season, never in July. Carry your refrigerant and inspection records across too — EPA Section 608 recordkeeping obligations follow the equipment, not the software. Setup questions are answered on the HVAC FAQ page and platform-by-platform notes live on the comparison hub.
QuoteIQ handles maintenance agreements through three connected pieces. Recurring invoice subscriptions carry the billing, including converting an accepted estimate directly into a recurring subscription with full discount, tax and deposit maths. Recurring calendar events carry the visits, and individual occurrences can be dragged without disturbing the rest of the series — essential when a July emergency forces you to move one tune-up. Email and text automations from Pro carry the reminders, firing on events with personalisation tags so a spring message reads like a person wrote it. Around that, route optimization cuts 15–30% of drive time on membership routes, the Client Portal lets members view appointments and pay without calling the office, and the Review Multiplier converts completed visits into public reviews. With 88% of U.S. homes air-conditioned, the recurring base is the most defensible revenue an HVAC company can build.
Rather than read another feature list, watch the overview. It covers what the platform does end to end, from first estimate through to payment collected.
The whole sequence fits inside the 14-day trial. Do it in a shoulder season and it is an afternoon of setup plus a week of watching.
The trial gives you the chosen plan’s features, so trialling Essentials tells you nothing about Elite. If self-booking and routing are the reason you are switching, trial Elite. A credit or debit card is required to start, and you can cancel any time before the 14 days are up.
Export a CSV from your current system and run it through AI Smart Import, which maps the columns for you, or pull contacts straight from your phone. Then load your twenty most common HVAC tasks into the Price Book with real pricing — that list, not the software, is what makes quoting fast.
Take a live job all the way through: estimate on site, e-signature from the homeowner, schedule the visit, document it with QuoteIQ Cam, invoice it, and collect payment. One complete loop teaches you more than a week of clicking around, and it surfaces anything that does not fit your process while you can still change your mind.
Turn on the automations that do the work you keep forgetting — estimate follow-ups, appointment reminders, maintenance-agreement renewals, review requests after payment. Verify that customers, open estimates and scheduled visits all landed, then cancel the old subscription.
QuoteIQ LLC was founded on 21 September 2022 in Savannah, Georgia, by two Co-Founders who had already spent years running field service businesses. That shows up in the product as a bias toward the things that decide whether a small contracting company survives — how fast a quote goes out, whether the follow-up happens without anyone remembering, and whether the person in the truck can do the whole job from a phone.
Mike co-founded QuoteIQ in 2022 after years running multi-trade service businesses, and publishes on field service operations, pricing discipline, hiring and contractor business strategy. His insights series answers the questions operators actually ask — how to price a job you have never done before, and how to hold quality steady once you stop being on every site yourself.
Justin co-founded QuoteIQ alongside Mike and writes about systems, pricing for profit, and building an operation that runs without the owner standing in the middle of it. His insights series concentrates on the revenue ceilings most contractors stall against and the operational changes that get a company past them.
The verified reviews below come from operators in HVAC-adjacent trades — plumbing, electrical and handyman work — which is the closest match available in the QuoteIQ verified reviews database. Each is quoted from the reviewer’s own App Store or Google Play submission.
“Intuitive UI, easy tracking, scheduling and sales pipeline.”
— Laura_Zellan · App Store · Plumbing
“Real easy to navigate with an arsenal of tools that’ll help keep business flowing.”
— Gavino Rodriguez · Google Play · Electrical
“Customizable inspection checklists in QuoteIQ reduce liability and improve service quality for handyman services.”
— mcgill_filibertov · App Store · Handyman
A 14-day free trial on every plan. Pricing starts at $29.99/mo and runs to $699/mo for unlimited users, with two months free on annual billing.
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Estimates
Create and send professional estimates.
Invoicing
Send, track and collect invoices.
QuoteIQ Cam
Capture and document every job with ease.
Scheduling
Schedule jobs to your calendar in seconds.
Inspection Forms
Create and complete inspection reports.
MapMeasure Pro
Measure and price properties instantly.
Business Analytics
Real-time insight into your performance.
EmployeeHub
Assign, schedule & pay employees.
Virtual Call Team
Never miss a call with 24/7 AJ, assistant.
ClientHub
Send and keep messages inside QuoteIQ.
InstaQuote
Allow customers to create estimates themselves.
InstaSchedule
Let clients schedule appointments themselves.
Facebook User Group
Connect with and get advice from other QuoteIQ users.
Competitor Comparisons
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Press & Media
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