What ux designers need from their software, from sources outside FreshBooks and outside Nexa:
Disclosure first: Nexa's publisher wrote this page, so weigh it accordingly. We haven't run a UX practice through either tool. Everything below comes from each vendor's published feature list, and you can check each item yourself. On that basis, FreshBooks covers the money side of a design practice well: invoicing, time tracking, a client portal, professional invoice templates, and on Plus and above, receipt scanning, financial reports and accountant access. That supports the income tracking behind quarterly estimated taxes and self-employment tax, though neither tool fills in the Form 1040-ES worksheet for you. Proposals start on Plus, and its list doesn't say whether clients can sign them. That matters because under 17 U.S.C. § 204(a) a copyright transfer is only valid in a signed writing. The list also doesn't mention a lead pipeline, a booking page for evening or weekend calls, or 1099-NEC totals for freelancers you hire. A missing line isn't proof of a missing feature, so ask FreshBooks about each one. Plans below Premium cap clients (5 on Lite, 50 on Plus), and archived clients count toward the cap.
Nexa lists a CRM with a pipeline board, lead scoring and a public lead form, which suits designers who spend time finding and competing for contracts. It also lists a booking page with intake forms and reschedule links, proposals that convert to invoices, estimates clients can sign in its pay portal, and 1099 summaries. A signature on an estimate doesn't by itself assign copyright. You still need to write the transfer clause and have a lawyer check it. We haven't tested the 1099 summaries, so compare them with the IRS instructions, including the current reporting threshold and the January 31 deadline. The limits matter for this trade. Automated emails (sequences, workflows, reminders) send only while Nexa is open on one of your devices, so a lead follow-up won't go out if the app is closed. Calendar export is an .ics file, since there's no Google Calendar sync. There's no hosted support desk or vendor onboarding, and without the optional Cloud Sync it runs on one device.
Over three years, FreshBooks at $43 a month ($516 a year) costs $1,548. Nexa is $279 once (or 3 payments of $99), or $458.64 with Cloud Sync at $4.99 a month. If you want a pipeline, signed estimates and contractor totals in one place, and you're comfortable running software yourself and keeping it open, Nexa is a reasonable fit at that price. Stay with FreshBooks if you want vendor phone or email support, a hosted service with no setup, or accountant access on Plus. Before switching, run one real client from lead to signed estimate to final invoice, log one contractor payment, and check the 1099 summary against your own records. FreshBooks has a 30-day free trial with no credit card, so you can run the same test there and judge both on your own work instead of on our word.
Our read for ux designers: Both can run a UX practice: pick Nexa for a built-in pipeline and signed estimates if you'll self-manage and keep it open, or stay with FreshBooks for hosted support and accountant access.
Read on each linked page in October 2026. Check them again before you decide; vendors change plans often.
FreshBooks costs ux designers $516/year at today's list price. Nexa is $279 once for invoicing, scheduling, CRM, time tracking and accounting in one suite — so after 6.5 months it has cost less than FreshBooks, 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 FreshBooks 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 ux designers: Either can do the job, for the reasons in our read above. On price alone, that is $279 once against $1,548 for FreshBooks over three years.
Invoicing, client records, time tracking and job tracking are the pieces of that day. Some tools rent you each piece separately. A few — Nexa among them — bundle the lot into something you buy once. 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. FreshBooks solves some of it. So does Nexa. The difference is what you are left holding in three years.
Today's list price is $43/month — $516 a year, from FreshBooks'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 $1,269 less.
If FreshBooks 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 | FreshBooks | Nexa |
|---|---|---|
| Invoicing | ✓ | ✓ |
| Scheduling | ✗ | ✓ |
| CRM | ✗ | ✓ |
| Time Tracking | ✓ | ✓ |
| Full Accounting | ✓ | ✓ (SIMPL) |
| Task Management | — | ✓ |
| Works offline | — | ✓ |
| Price | $43/mo | $279 once or 3 × $99 |
| 3-Year Total | $1,548 | $279 |
| You own it? | No — stop paying, lose access | Yes — forever |
✓ and ✗ for FreshBooks come from its own published feature list. — means the feature isn't in that list, which is not the same as FreshBooks lacking it: check with them. Three years is at today's price.
Straight from FreshBooks's own feature set. If one of these is the reason you pay them, that reason does not disappear because Nexa is cheaper.
FreshBooks is the better call if you need very user-friendly for non-accountants specifically, or if your team is large enough that per-seat pricing still beats buying software outright.
FreshBooks says it is "perfect for everyone from self-employed professionals to growing business owners." It lists four audiences: freelancers, solopreneurs, businesses with employees, and businesses with contractors. (freshbooks.com)
What people outside FreshBooks and outside Nexa say:
Read on each linked page in October 2026. Check them again before you decide; vendors change plans often.
Software doesn't do the creative work — it automates the business around it. And that part is the same for every ux designer: 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 the creative work. Tap a step to see what gets automated.
An inquiry becomes a proposal becomes a signed project — with the scope and the deposit locked in.
The work itself — tracked against the project: hours, milestones, revisions, and expenses, so nothing bills late or goes uncounted.
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 the creative work. (Nexa is built to be the one — but the honest options for each step are above and below.)
This is the connection that makes the rest worth it. A ux designer's job already holds the services, the hours, the add-ons, and the materials — so the invoice builds itself from the work instead of you re-typing it at 9pm. Toggle an add-on or nudge the hours and watch it recompute.
You didn't write this invoice — the job did.
FreshBooks plus whatever else you're paying for:
Email yourself this comparison?
The median UX designer earns $65,000/year. At $516/year, FreshBooks 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 ux designers. You own it like you own your Figma (with Dev Mode and FigJam for wireframes, prototypes, and handoff specs).
An honest fit check — because the wrong tool is worse than no tool.
The honest fit: if you're a solo or small ux designers 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 →Active community — tool picks, pricing, and day-to-day questions.
Open on Reddit →Invoicing, client records, time tracking and job tracking are the pieces of that day. Some tools rent you each piece separately. A few — Nexa among them — bundle the lot into something you buy once. The sections below price both routes honestly.
The morning often opens with a moderated user interview over Zoom, recording running, discussion guide on the second monitor, probing why a participant abandoned a flow rather than what they clicked. Mid-morning is synthesis: pulling quotes into Dovetail or a Miro board, clustering observations into an affinity diagram until patterns emerge that the client's assumptions missed. By midday the designer is in Figma, translating those patterns into low-fidelity wireframes, then wiring screens into a clickable prototype that simulates the real navigation. Afternoons fill with reviews, a stakeholder call where the product manager weighs business constraints against the research, a design critique where a peer pokes at edge cases, or a tense moment defending a finding a founder doesn't want to hear. Then come revisions, often a second or third round, each one a quiet negotiation about whether it's covered by the contract. Late in the day is handoff work: annotating components in Dev Mode, marking frames ready for dev, exporting assets, and logging the reasoning behind decisions so engineers don't reinvent them. Threaded through all of it: tracking which deliverables a milestone payment is tied to, and which client still hasn't signed off on the last one.
Real ux designers near you who run their business on Nexa — book directly, no platform fee. Are you an ux designer? Post your business and get found in your area — $2.99 one-time. Or browse every ux designer 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 an ux designer'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 an ux designer — 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 ux designers and small teams, yes. invoicing, scheduling, CRM, time tracking, task management, and full accounting — all for $279 once. FreshBooks may be better if you have a large team (10+) or need enterprise-specific features.
FreshBooks has features like Very user-friendly for non-accountants and Built-in time tracking that some businesses rely on. For most solo ux designers, these aren't dealbreakers.
At $43/month, Nexa pays for itself in 6.5 months. After that: $516 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