What permanent makeup artists need from their software, from sources outside Booksy and outside Nexa:
Booksy covers the booking side of this trade well. It has online booking around the clock, deposits, cancellation fees, free SMS reminders and an automated waitlist, which protect an artist whose appointments run long and are costly to lose. Its marketplace, Google booking and Instagram and Facebook links can bring in new clients. It also handles card payments, loyalty and rebooking tools, and staff and commission tracking. The weak spot is the paperwork this trade is regulated on. Its feature list says nothing about health and sensitivity history, signed client acknowledgments, ID copies, per-procedure details such as ink color and manufacturer ID, retention timers, or tracking a shop license separately from a personal one.
Nexa has some of the building blocks for records, but not a records system. It offers a public booking page with intake forms, a CRM with notes and tags, notes that can be checklists and are linked to a client, and phone photos kept on a job (before, after, progress). It also has invoices, a client pay portal through your own Stripe account, and bookkeeping. It has gaps for this trade. A client has no street-address field, and Texas requires the client's address. It sends no text messages, has no waitlist, has no card reader and brings in no customers. Its automated emails and reminders send only while Nexa is open on one of your devices. You own and run it yourself, with no hosted support desk or vendor-run onboarding.
Over three years Booksy comes to $1,079.64 ($29.99 a month, $359.88 a year), and extra users cost more. Nexa is $279 once, or $458.64 if you add optional Cloud Sync at $4.99 a month for the full period. Without sync it runs on one device. The price gap is real, but neither tool is a reliable home for state-required client records. Keep whichever one you use for booking, and keep your regulated records in a dedicated client-records and consent tool built for body-art studios. That tool should be searchable and exportable, with a configurable retention period and license renewal tracking. Stay on Booksy if deposits, SMS reminders and marketplace bookings bring in your clients. Choose Nexa only if you want to own the software and don't depend on those.
Our read for permanent makeup artists: Neither tool is built to hold the health, consent, ID, per-procedure and retention records this trade needs, so pair your booking tool with a dedicated body-art client-records and consent system.
Read on each linked page in October 2026. Check them again before you decide; vendors change plans often.
Booksy costs permanent makeup artists $359.88/year at today's list price. Nexa is $279 once for invoicing, scheduling, CRM, time tracking and accounting in one suite — so after 9.3 months it has cost less than Booksy, and you own it after that. What it is not: hosted-for-you software with a support desk and a roadmap you can lobby. That is the trade, and the rest of this page is the detail behind it.
Nexa is $279 once, about $23 a month over its first year. Its Drain Guard reads your expenses (from a linked bank, an imported statement, or ones you type in), finds the charges that repeat, and adds them up by the month. Keep or Cut then walks you through them one at a time. Cancel $23 a month of charges you'd forgotten about and Nexa has paid for itself inside the first year, before you count the Booksy bill you'd stop paying.
It depends on what you find and what you cancel, so we don't promise a number. In our demo data, Drain Guard finds 5 subscriptions adding up to $110.13 a month. That is sample data, not a customer's.
The verdict for permanent makeup artists: Neither Booksy nor Nexa is the main system for this work; start with software built for it. Nexa only makes sense beside it, at $279 once against $1,079.64 for Booksy over three years.
Scheduling, client records, invoicing and the books are the pieces of that day. Some tools rent you each piece separately. A few — Nexa among them — bundle the lot and carry their own booking link, with no per-appointment cut. The sections below price both routes honestly.
None of that is a software problem you can buy your way out of in one click — it is why the tool you pick matters more than what it costs. Booksy solves some of it. So does Nexa. The difference is what you are left holding in three years.
Today's list price is $29.99/month — $359.88 a year, from Booksy's own pricing page. Every figure below is that price, multiplied. Nothing is projected.
Nexa: $279 once (or 3 × $99). Over the same three years, that is $800.64 less.
If Booksy raises its price, the three-year cost goes up; if it cuts it, the cost comes down. We don't guess which. Add-ons, extra seats and card-processing fees are not included, on either side.
| Feature | Booksy | Nexa |
|---|---|---|
| Invoicing | ✗ | ✓ |
| Scheduling | ✓ | ✓ |
| CRM | ✓ | ✓ |
| Time Tracking | ✗ | ✓ |
| Full Accounting | ✗ | ✓ (SIMPL) |
| Task Management | ✗ | ✓ |
| Works offline | — | ✓ |
| Price | $29.99/mo | $279 once or 3 × $99 |
| 3-Year Total | $1,079.64 | $279 |
| You own it? | No — stop paying, lose access | Yes — forever |
✓ and ✗ for Booksy come from its own published feature list. — means the feature isn't in that list, which is not the same as Booksy lacking it: check with them. Three years is at today's price.
Straight from Booksy's own feature set. If one of these is the reason you pay them, that reason does not disappear because Nexa is cheaper.
Booksy is the better call if you need strong consumer marketplace (35m+ users) specifically, or if your team is large enough that per-seat pricing still beats buying software outright.
Booksy's business site says it is for independent beauty and barber professionals and for salon and barbershop owners, including barbers, hair stylists, nail techs, brow and lash artists, braiders, massage and spas. It also says it supports multi-staff businesses. (biz.booksy.com)
Read on each linked page in October 2026. Check them again before you decide; vendors change plans often.
Software doesn't do your clients — it automates the business around it. And that part is the same for every permanent makeup artist: find the work, manage it, bill for it, get paid. Each step has a tool — and the right single tool runs the whole loop, so the handoffs are automatic and you get back to your clients. Tap a step to see what gets automated.
A new client finds you and books a time — no phone tag, no double-booking.
The session itself — with the client history, notes, packages, and add-ons right there instead of in three different places.
The work becomes the invoice — the hours, the add-ons, the materials, the deposit credited — totaled and sent, instead of re-typed at 9pm.
Paid by card or link, the deposit credited, and what's overdue chased — without you doing it by hand.
You can stitch four separate subscriptions across these four steps, or run one tool that does the whole flow so a booking becomes a job becomes an invoice becomes a payment without re-typing. Either way the goal is the same: less time on the business of the business, more on your clients. (Nexa is built to be the one — but the honest options for each step are above and below.)
Booksy plus whatever else you're paying for:
Email yourself this comparison?
The median permanent makeup artist earns $55,000/year. At $359.88/year, Booksy is a recurring slice of that — paid again every year, whether the year was good or not. Owning the same jobs outright is $279 once, and the slice stops.
Nexa is $279 once. Invoicing, scheduling, CRM, time tracking, accounting — all connected, built for permanent makeup artists. You own it like you own your PMU machine and needles.
An honest fit check — because the wrong tool is worse than no tool.
The honest fit: if you're a solo or small permanent makeup artists business that owns its tools and is sick of renting software, Nexa replaces your whole stack for $279 once. If you're scaling into a large team with dedicated admin staff, a bigger platform may fit better — and we'd rather tell you that now than sell you the wrong thing.
Your people are already online — swapping real numbers, tool picks, and war stories. Here's where to find them.
Active community — tool picks, pricing, and day-to-day questions.
Open on Reddit →Active community — tool picks, pricing, and day-to-day questions.
Open on Reddit →Scheduling, client records, invoicing and the books are the pieces of that day. Some tools rent you each piece separately. A few — Nexa among them — bundle the lot and carry their own booking link, with no per-appointment cut. The sections below price both routes honestly.
You have 3 appointments today: ombre brows initial ($500, 3 hours), lip blush touch-up ($150, 1.5 hours), and a consultation for eyeliner ($0, 30 min). Supplies per procedure: $40 in needles, pigment, and disposables. Your suite costs $1,400/month. The touch-up is half price but full supply cost. The consultation might not convert. You need to track per-procedure profitability but you're just checking your bank account.
Real permanent makeup artists near you who run their business on Nexa — book directly, no platform fee. Are you a permanent makeup artist? Post your business and get found in your area — $2.99 one-time. Or browse every permanent makeup artist on Nexa →
The tools of the trade — each a one-time buy that earns its keep for years.
You paid for these once because good tools last. That's the bar your software should clear too — priced like a tool you own, $279 once, not a subscription that costs more than your kit every year.
We build a permanent makeup artist's guide the same way every time, and we'd rather you trust it than take it on faith. Nexa is our product, so the test we hold ourselves to is simple: a tool only "wins" a job here when it genuinely does that job better for a permanent makeup artist — and where something free, open-source, or buy-once does it better, we say so and link you to it. Where Nexa falls short (payroll is the honest example), we name the alternative outright.
Found something out of date? Prices change and we don't catch every move the day it happens. This guide is published and maintained by the Nexa team; if a figure here is wrong, tell us and we'll fix it — getting it right matters more to us than the sale.
For solo permanent makeup artists and small teams, yes. invoicing, scheduling, CRM, time tracking, task management, and full accounting — all for $279 once. Booksy may be better if you have a large team (10+) or need enterprise-specific features.
Booksy has features like Strong consumer marketplace (35M+ users) and Mobile-first design that some businesses rely on. For most solo permanent makeup artists, these aren't dealbreakers.
At $29.99/month, Nexa pays for itself in 9.3 months. After that: $359.88 saved every year.
Yes. Nexa is $279 as a one-time payment, or 3 payments of $99 ($297 total). Either way it's a one-time purchase — no subscription, no recurring fees ever.
Own your tools. Stop renting your software.
Get Nexa — $279 Once