Okason vs LawnBuddy

LawnBuddy says it serves 44,005 customers and has been at this longer than we have. If you want the enterprise-versus-small-crew argument, that’s the Jobber comparison. This one comes down to details.

Three of them, mostly: what you get at the entry tier, what payments cost you, and whether the thing holds up in season.

What you actually get at the entry tier

This is where the two products differ most, and it’s worth being precise rather than snide.

LawnBuddy’s entry tier is free, and it’s a real product: customer records, messaging, tags and views, automatic tax and late fees, digital payments, subscriptions, prepay, QuickBooks integration, data download, automatic invoicing, and recurring or one-time jobs with list, map and calendar views.

What its own comparison table marks as not included at that tier: custom invoice branding, estimates, aerial site measurement, equipment tracking, crew assignment, routing, and time tracking. Estimates start at the second tier. Crew assignment, route optimization and the separate crew app start at the third. Time tracking is top tier only.

For a crew that quotes work, assigns jobs and drives a route — which is every crew we build for — the useful configuration is not the free one.

Okason gates things too, and we’d rather show you exactly where:

The pattern is different: Okason puts quoting and getting paid on every plan and charges for crew size and back-office depth. Full details on the pricing page.

What payments cost you

LawnBuddy’s public pricing page lists a different card processing rate on each tier, with the highest rate on the free tier and lower rates as you pay more. The page notes the fee can be passed to the purchaser.

We’re not going to print their numbers. Rates move, and a stale figure on a marketing page is worse than no figure. The structure is the point, and the structure is clear on their own page: the cheaper your subscription, the more each payment costs you.

That is the standard way a free tier in this market funds itself. It also means the free plan gets more expensive exactly as your business gets better.

Okason adds no markup to card payments, and the arrangement is identical on Solo, Crew and Crew Pro. You pay Stripe’s published rate and Okason takes nothing on top of it. Upgrading buys you seats and features — never a better rate, because there is no Okason rate to improve.

Do the arithmetic once, on your own numbers:

1. Take a real month of card volume — a June, not a February
2. Find the rate your current tier charges
3. Multiply
4. Compare that against a flat plan plus your processor’s published rate

For a crew running meaningful card volume, the surcharge usually dwarfs the subscription difference. For a mostly-cash operation, it may not. Run it yourself.

On passing fees to the customer: it’s legal in most states and it’s a real lever. It is also a conversation with every customer, and a reason a homeowner remembers your invoice for the wrong reason. Okason records card, cash and check against the invoice they settle, and any crew member can record a cash or check payment at the property. See payments.

Reliability

Both apps are on Google Play with public reviews. LawnBuddy’s are mostly positive — in a sample of 100 recent public reviews we pulled on 16 September 2026, a majority were five stars, and the app has tens of thousands of downloads on both stores.

The low-star reviews are worth reading before you commit a season to any tool, ours included. Verbatim, with dates:

“I’ve been bumped off twice now, been using this app for 4 years now. Only recently we are having problems. The first of this season, I had to ‘re-sign’ up. lost all my clients information. AND now today, we have to Sign Up again for services.” — 1 star, 1 September 2026

“Waste of time and money, app is fixed then 50 new bugs happen does not work when I need it most. Hindering my company from growth” — 1 star, 4 June 2023

“if all you want is an app to store customer information on this app does that. it doesn’t do anything else it claims worthwhile, it’s poorly setup and now it won’t even show me my schedule after June.” — 1 star, 5 May 2025

We’re not claiming Okason is bug-free. We’re a newer product and we have fewer seasons behind us — that’s a fair thing to hold against us. What we can tell you is where we’ve drawn the lines that make data loss less likely to matter:

• Records don’t vanish when you retire them. Deleting a customer is an archive, confirmed by name, with history preserved — and it’s refused outright while they have unpaid invoices. Deactivating a property keeps it visible on the customer profile.
• Numbering is sequential and never reused. Invoices are INV-001 up, payments PMT-0001 up, never edited.
• Editing a price isn’t retroactive. Change a service price and documents already written keep their numbers, so your history stays accurate.
• Import tells you what failed. CSV import returns every skipped row with its number and reason, downloadable so you can fix and re-run.
• Payments aren’t edited in place. A wrong cash payment is deleted by the owner and the invoice balance reverses automatically, so history carries no confusing correction entries.

Nothing here is a promise that software never breaks. It’s a description of what happens when it does.

Where Okason is stronger

Your customer doesn’t create an account

LawnBuddy’s homeowner-facing documentation includes troubleshooting for customers who get stuck joining. That is the tell: there’s a join step.

Okason’s customer portal has no join step. The link in your email is the identity. Your customer taps it, sees the bill under your name and logo with the Amount Due as the largest number on the page, and pays the full balance by card through Stripe Checkout. On an estimate they tap Approve — one confirmation naming the total — or Decline with an optional reason, and you’re notified either way.

No account, no password, no app, no plan badge, and they’re never a seat. Included on every plan, uncapped.

Talk-to-Estimate

Walk the property, say what the job needs, and the AI returns line items matched against your own Price List with names, quantities and prices. Low-confidence rows are flagged and editable; nothing sends until you send it. Your phone transcribes, so only text reaches Okason and no audio is recorded or stored.

It’s on Solo, Crew and Crew Pro. Nothing else in this comparison does it.

The property is its own record

A customer with a house, a rental and a vacant lot is one customer and three properties, each carrying its own Gate Code, Access Notes, job instructions, photos, property manager contact, and its own Price Per Cut, Lot Size, Lawn Size and Mulch Quantity.

The rental prices differently from the house without a workaround, and a crew member can fix a wrong gate code from the curb. See customer management.

Three roles, and the money simply isn’t there

Okason has Owner, Manager and Crew Member. A Manager runs every crew, assigns jobs and handles estimates and invoices without seeing billing settings or anybody’s hourly rate. Hourly Rate is Owner-only — not visible to Managers, and not to the person themselves.

For a Crew Member the money sections do not render at all, on the phone or on a laptop, and the restriction is enforced on the server. Crew members can pick prices from your catalog but cannot change one.

A price list that starts full

Every new Okason account is seeded with 50+ landscaping services across Mowing, Trimming, Cleanup, Installation, Fertilization, Aeration, Snow and Other — each with a description, duration, default price and a guidance range. Fix the ten you quote most and you can send a real estimate the same day. See service catalog.

The rained-out Tuesday, and the season set up once

A weekly mow is one recurring job holding an iCal rule that generates visits 90 days out, and any single visit can be skipped, moved or edited without touching the series. When Thursday comes in wet, Reschedule Day moves that day’s scheduled and in-progress jobs together, lists what moved and what was skipped with reasons, and can notify each moved customer.

Where LawnBuddy may be the better choice

If you need time tracking today. LawnBuddy has check-in and check-out at job sites, employee time reports, manual entries and estimated-versus-actual comparison on its top tier. Okason has none of it in this release, and we’d rather say so than sell you a screen that doesn’t exist.

If you want unlimited crew members. On the tiers that include crews, LawnBuddy charges nothing per person. Okason caps seats at 1, 3 and 6. Past six people, we are not the right tool.

If you measure properties from aerial imagery. Aerial site measurement with shapes, multiple surfaces and volume calculation is theirs from the second tier. Okason stores lot and lawn size on the property; it doesn’t measure them for you.

If you want customers to prepay or hold a card for subscriptions. Subscriptions, prepay and saved cards are on their side. Okason’s portal settles the full balance of one invoice by card, with no saved cards in this release.

If you want the option to pass processing fees to customers. Their page markets it; we don’t build it.

If longevity matters to you. They claim 44,005 customers and have years of seasons behind them. We’re newer. That’s a legitimate reason to choose them.