For solo painters quoting from the phone. Drag across one bedroom repaint, napkin vs real estimate.
Drag left to see the lined estimate. Same $830; the "profit" on the napkin is $300 too high.
Updated November 2026 · Listings checked November 2026 · ScopeBid is made by us, the Honest Little Apps studio
YouI paint houses on my own. What's the best estimate app for painters?
Short answer
It depends on one thing: do you want the app to take payments and sync to the cloud, or do you want it to remember your pricing and work offline? Joist leans toward the first, ScopeBid (ours) toward the second, and Paint Estimator Pro is built only for painters. All three are free to download.
The best painting estimate app is the one that makes you price labor every time, not the one with the most features.
YouOkay, side by side?
Painting estimate apps compared
Three iPhone painting estimate apps, from their listings
| App | Price on the listing | Built for | Stands out for | Watch for |
|---|
| Joist | Free to try; in-app plans from $9.99/month (Basics) to $31.99/month (Elite) | Contractors in general | Card and PayPal payments in-app (US and Canada), contracts with signature, scheduling, cloud access from any device or the web | Monthly cost adds up; your data lives in their cloud |
| Paint Estimator Pro | Free; no in-app purchases listed | Painters only | Labor and material costs, a quick gross-profit view, PDF estimates with photos, upsell options, crew work orders, lead tracking | Last updated May 2025; listing requires iOS 12 or later |
| ScopeBid (ours) | Free for your first 3 quotes with full PDFs; then ScopeBid Pro, monthly or annual | Painters, cleaners, handymen, landscapers, small contractors | Reuses pricing from past jobs; Profit Guard shows margin and markup separately; works with no signal; no account | Records payments but doesn't process cards; no cloud copy, so back up yourself |
Sources: each app's U.S. App Store listing as shown in November 2026 (Joist, Paint Estimator Pro, ScopeBid). Prices and features change; check the listing before you subscribe. We left out web-first platforms and apps we couldn't check on the App Store.
YouWhere does ScopeBid fall short?
The honest limits
ScopeBid doesn't process cards or move money; it records cash, cheque, e-transfer, bank transfer or card-terminal payments you've already received. There's no web dashboard and no cloud copy of your business data, which is the design decision: your pricing stays on your phone and quoting works in a basement with no signal. It also isn't accounting or tax software; you set your own tax rates.
It doesn't measure rooms or calculate gallons for you either. Paint Estimator Pro is the painting-specific one here.
Pick something else if you want customers to pay by card from the invoice, or you run several crews who need a shared cloud schedule. Joist covers both on its listing.
A Saturday quote
The $650 that was really $350
A painter quotes a 12-by-14 bedroom at $830. Paint, tape and plastic come to $180, so the napkin says $650 profit. But the job takes 12 hours, and at $25 an hour that's $300 of labor, whether a helper earns it or the painter does. Real gross profit: $350, a 42.2% gross margin (a 72.9% markup on the $480 cost).
Still a fine job. The point is knowing it before the customer asks for 10% off. At $747 the gross profit drops to $267, a 35.7% margin. This story is an illustration; every number is checked in code.
For a sense of scale, the Bureau of Labor Statistics' Occupational Outlook Handbook puts the median pay of construction and maintenance painters at $23.75 an hour (May 2025) and says about 31 percent are self-employed. If that's you, the IRS notes your labor line also has to carry self-employment tax of 15.3%.
Any estimate app is only as honest as the labor line you put in it.
Quote the next room with labor in it
Start from your last paint job, check Profit Guard, send the PDF. Open ScopeBid in the App Store: first 3 quotes free.
Free on iPhone
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