QuoteIron vs Joist — what each one charges for.

Where the two actually differ.

The entry price isn't the comparison. Joist's Basics plan is listed at $9.99 a month billed monthly (2026-09-11), below QuoteIron's $15.99 — a real number, not a trick. The line to read is the one printed right under it: “Up to 5 documents per month.” Send more than five estimates or invoices in a month and the plan you're really pricing is Pro at $16.99/mo, where Joist lists “Unlimited documents & clients.” A dollar apart is close enough that price shouldn't decide this.

What decides it is which features sit behind a tier wall. On Joist's page (2026-09-11), change orders and the license-and-insurance block are under Elite at $31.99/mo, and job organizing and scheduled visits under Run at $70/mo introductory. QuoteIron has one paid tier, so change orders, a job address, your license line, payment terms and due dates, partial payments with a running balance, receipts, tax-exempt clients and private job notes are all simply in it. If the two or three things you need most are the ones Joist puts a tier up, the gap widens fast.

The price book isn't on their pricing page at all. QuoteIron ships 1100+ job templates across fourteen trades. They carry structure only — a typical labor-hour figure and a mid-grade materials cost — and your labor rate, markup and rounding do the pricing, so the book reprices itself when your rate changes. See it work in the free book builder, or read the method in how to build a flat-rate price book.

Offline, Spanish and the mobile OSes are blanks on their page — none of the three appear on it, so we claim nothing either way; ask them. On our side, offline and Spanish are load-bearing: QuoteIron is local-first, which is why it keeps working in a crawlspace with no bars, and the whole interface plus every job template is in English and Spanish, reviewed by native speakers. It runs on iPhone, iPad and Android.

Where Joist is the better answer. Homeowner financing in the app, an AI receptionist answering your phone (their add-on, $49 /mo), the sales-reporting and review tools on their higher tiers — real products on their page, with no QuoteIron equivalent (QuoteIron has no financing program of its own; at card checkout Stripe may offer your customer a pay-over-time option such as Klarna, but only if your account is eligible and the amount fits the lender's limits, so don't count on it.). We're deliberately narrow: price the job, send the paper, get paid, without a signal. Anything wider is a fair reason to pick something else.