Justin nailed it right on the head. Well said my friend. How can we trust a company who out of nowhere decides to charge me for something I've been using to run my small business for years? If I was never offered these amenedies from the beginning, I would not have a problem... In my eyes it's no different than this scenario.If I saw someone walking to work every day in the snow and I offered them a free car to use for 5 years, then at the start of the 6th year I said you can still use the car but you have to start paying me a monthly fee. If you don't like it, you can still use the car but I'm taking two of the tires, the steering wheel, and the headlights. This is what I feel is happening with the joist app right now. I asked numerous times when I first signed up " there will never be a fee in the future right"?Again and again I was told nope, this is totally free. I feel my business would look unprofessional if I uprooted my estimate and invoicing software out of the blue. I hope the joist team reconsiders this move as I've loved the app since day 1.

This is my favorite app for bidding and invoicing! The two reasons I gave it less than 5 stars are as follows: 1. Every time you navigate to a different app during estimate editing mode (example: to copy and paste from your notes), it closes the edit and doesn’t save any changes. The app refreshes each time you close a bid, etc. Makes for a lot of wasted time while it reloads ten times more frequently than needed. I have brought this up to the Joist team and they said they would look into it, but never fixed it. 2. The app keeps sending annoying messages to try to get me to sign up for PayPal payments, and no matter how often I decline, they keep throwing it in front of me each time I open the app. Like please stop wasting our time. We are paying for the subscription, and you’re interrupting our busy day. If we could clear up those two issues, I would change my rating to 5 stars, and recommend this app strongly! It still remains the best one out there, but I always feel disrespected by the constant bugging to set up payments (PayPal isn’t trustworthy) and always having to re-edit any time I forget to save changes before I go grab a copy to paste from another app. You should not charge money unless you give satisfaction.Looking forward to improvements and honesty on their end. Joist team, please read this and fix it! It used to be different. I know it is possible! Thank you!

Joist has no business being in business. They can’t do ANYTHING right. You can’t actually talk to customer service, you can only chat with them. They never do anything they say they will do unless you ask several times over and over. When I wanted to set up payment receipts from joist, it took them 6 weeks to fix a problem in their end. Not only that, but I had to contact them 3 times to get it done. Every time I contacted them it was as if the previous person I “spoke” to never put in a request to have it fixed. Recently, the last straw. They advertised Joist Elite Pro as if it is available for all devices. It wasn’t until after I paid for it that I realized that it isn’t available for iOS or windows. They told me that AFTER I paid for it. I requested a refund and they said they would submit the request. More than one week later, still no refund. They have no idea what they are doing. When I requested the refund again today, I was told that the payment team only worked during business hours and that they would reach out to me on Monday. BS!! I’ll be disputing the charge with my credit card company and joist will never get another dime from me. Use the free version if you want, but DO NOT give them your money. They are dishonest and incapable of providing solutions to the problems they cause.

Great CRM program. Could maybe have a few more features available to Elite pros. However we love the simplicity of their app and it’s user friendly. It saves us so much time with estimates and billing. We’re 100% satisfied with the product and even signed up for a year given the discount offered to us at the end of our payment process. Their customer service was tremendous and extremely helpful when we began looking into their product as we had tons of questions or concerns. Great product Great price. It’s the perfect CRM for our company. Does everything we needed and even more than what we expected. Signed up and then found out we now were able to offer our customers financing options for their projects which was HUGE to us. I would love it if Joist could add a spot so their pro elite contractors can request reviews from our customers. Maybe someday. 100% satisfied would 100% recommend.

I usually don’t write reviews. I was one of the contractors that began using the app after the premium features were added. I saw many other reviews during that time that spoke about the company being greedy and complaining about taking away features that were once free. I didn’t see any problem with it at the time. They were letting you use the app but you have to pay for premium features. It was understandable to expect the company to make some money on a product that they are taking time and effort to build and support. We’re all businesspeople. We should understand. No one should be working for free. Fast forward to today and I have received an email stating that at the end of month nothing in the app will be free. Just to send 5 invoices a month you have to pay $8 per month. After using this app for almost two years and then to to have it changed up on me like that, I’m starting to see what the fuss was about in the first place. The company is taking a big risk in doing this. They have the freedom of choice to take that risk. They have the freedom to charge whatever they want. I’m a small contractor that only does side work every so often so I can’t justify paying a fee every month for basic features that I can use from another free app. I think including advertisements in the free version would have been more beneficial for them but whatever. It’s their company. I thought Joist catered more to small contractors but seems like they are scaling it to meet the needs of bigger companies. If they add dispatching, price book, etc they will be there with the likes of ServiceTitan and Housecall Pro etc. I never thought that was their intended audience but ok. I’m moving on though and many others probably will also.

I’ve been using this app for years. It’s a simple app to create invoice and estimates (not a lot of design options but I never wanted anything too fancy anyway) to send to customers as well as create a price book, customer log, etc. So it’s been extremely helpful. Recently however they’ve “upgraded” and locked me out of features such as the ability to take pictures and save them to the invoice or estimate, something I use almost every time!!! Also it appears I will not get notifications like I used to when customers opened my emails. It’s one thing to add to the app and charge for new features, it’s robbery frankly to lock me out of features I’ve always been able to use! On top of that they want to charge me $12/month for it!!! I could see paying $12 one time to unlock the features I’ve always had. But this is total BS. I’m not asking for something to be free. But $12/month is way too much to charge, I’m just a little fish and use this app for my side work. Even if I did a lot more work $12/month is way too much. Hope the app developers see this and get enough other poor reviews so they will change this. At least give me back my features that I already had and actually work to add new features to charge for.

It was bad enough that they took half of the features away but now limited to only 5 per month unless I pay a ransom? Their financing option are terrible, customer service is bad…. What are we supposed to be paying for? I have went back to paper invoices and I will never use nor recommend this app ever again.Update. If I could get rid of this one star for a no star review that would be better. They think that their services are so great that now you have no access to them even though you have the app. Very bad customer service. And yes, I went to paper invoices with so many less headaches. I may consider paying for this if it was totally downloadable to my iPad or phone and usable without the internet, but when I’m in the middle of nowhere and can’t get service, this app won’t work. Worst is I can’t bill my customer on site. Bad idea. Since you think it’s worth charging for, give us something that isn’t junk cloud based.Update….I just had to pay these highway robbers 8 dollars just to get my clients list from them and that only covers 5 invoices a month? That’s absolutely nuts. You will never see a dime from me again. I will tell every contractor that I know not to use your crooked company!

The developers pulled a bait and switch tactic on everyone that’s been using this app for more than a few months. They created the free app, allowed people to get used to using it, and then decided to make you have to pay a monthly fee to continue using certain parts of the app that have been free up until this recent change. It’s incredibly unprofessional and low class. If you want people to pay for the app then add things to the app that weren’t already a part of the free app. Don’t take things away that have been a part of the app since it was first released and claim that it’s now part of the “Pro” package. If you want us to pay for the app then add features that make it worth paying for. Placing features that had previously been free behind a paywall is just laziness. Why bother being innovative and coming up w new ideas that people will want to pay for when you can just take things away that they’re used to using and make them pay $12/month to get them back. Unless it goes back to the way it was before, I’ll be finding another app to replace the Joist app and will no longer recommend the Joist app to all the contractors I know and work with. Such a shame when greed takes over.

I had used Joist for years as a convenient way to get invoices and estimates to my customers. I accidentally left the pay by echeck option open on a couple invoices and two customers paid 23k in payments through Joist payment processing. I can’t get my money from them. There is no phone support, all they have is live chat with support staff in India. They want all sorts of documentation to release my funds that is absolutely unreasonable and not in line with any other payment processing company we’ve ever used before. Going on three weeks now waiting for my money I’m about to ask my customers to cancel the payment and ask Joist to issue a refund, which will probably take another 2 weeks. Beware - This app will leave the pay through pay through Joist option checked and if you don’t uncheck and customers use it they will have your money for an unspecified amount of time, provide vague answers about when it will be released and ask you to keep supplying them with different documentation seemingly to lead you on a wild goose chase. An app that is purportedly here to help the small contractor actually causes enormous strain on a small business and just doesn’t seem to care.

When I first installed the app and began using Joist, I thought wow what a great app. It is super handy for Estimates and invoices. However, I am fairly new to Joist and sent a invoice to a customer on a Sunday evening not paying attention to the fact that I had left the option to “pay” turned on. Long story short the customer paid my required deposit via Joist, even though at the time I had not linked my bank account to Joist!! As soon as I realized what had happened I reached by “live chat” to Joist customer service. I immediately linked my bank account and patiently waited for my money to be deposited. 9 days later I still do not have my money. I since learned that anything OVER 10,000 is held for a 7 day period. I have submitted bank statements and Square payments, described in detail my business, what we do, how far we travel, submitted the fact that I have commercial insurance, you name it, I’ve submitted it in hopes of having the 7 day hold lifted. Now on day 9 I have not received any of the deposit and cannot get a straight answer as to why or when I will have the money! There is no “live” person available to speak to me! I am highly disappointed with Joist. Not at all what I would expect.