HoneyBook vs Dubsado vs Bonsai: what they actually cost

Every article on this comparison quotes prices. Very few of them say when they last looked, which for software pricing is the difference between a fact and a rumour with a decimal point.

So: all three pricing pages were fetched on 11 August 2026, and this is what they said that day.

HoneyBook. Starter $29/mo, Essentials $49/mo, Premium $109/mo billed annually. Billed monthly, Starter stays $29 while Essentials rises to $59 and Premium to $129. Card processing starts at 2.7% + 10¢; bank transfer is 1.5%.

Dubsado. Starter $335/yr, Premier $525/yr. No monthly price is published for either plan; the page notes only that annual saves the equivalent of two months. Extra brands are $10/mo. Three additional users are included, and beyond that users run $25 a month for four to ten, $45 for eleven to twenty, and $60 above that.

Bonsai. Per user, billed annually: Basic $9, Essentials $19, Premium $29, Elite $49. Billed monthly those become $15, $25, $39 and $59. Proposals, contracts and invoicing begin at Essentials.

Three things the comparison articles get wrong

Bonsai's $9 is not the price of the thing you want. It is quoted as the category's cheapest entry point constantly, and Basic does not include proposals, contracts or invoicing. The real comparison point is Essentials at $19 per user.

Dubsado's monthly price does not exist. Articles quote one anyway. It has been inferred from the annual figure, which is a reasonable estimate and is not what the company publishes.

HoneyBook's Starter costs the same either way. Some comparisons list a higher monthly Starter price, apparently carried forward from an older page. Annual saves you nothing at that tier; it does save real money at Essentials and Premium.

Why so many of these pages are vague

Worth knowing what you are reading when you read a roundup in this category, because the incentives are public and almost never disclosed.

HoneyBook publishes its referral terms: $50 for a referral that stays subscribed 100 days, rising to $200 for an Unlimited-plan purchase where the referrer has transacted $2,000 or more themselves, capped at $10,000 a year for anyone outside their educator programme. Dubsado runs a mutual-discount version instead — the person you refer gets 20% off their first month or year and you get a free month.

None of that is wrongdoing. Referral programmes are ordinary. The point is only that a page ranking three tools while earning two hundred dollars a signup on one of them has an interest, and the convention in this category is not to mention it. North has no affiliate relationship with any of the three, which is easy for us to say and also the reason we can print the prices flat.

Where North sits, honestly

If what you are shopping for is one system that runs the whole back office, one of those three is probably your answer, and this is where a comparison post is supposed to steer you toward its own product anyway.

North does the pre-close craft and the money that follows it: notes from a client call turned into a scoped project, tiered pricing with the arithmetic visible, a proposal, a contract bundled with it and revealed when the client accepts, e-signing, a private client deal room, and then invoices drafted, sent, tracked and chased, with card payment running through your own Stripe account. North takes no cut of that money, at any volume, and that is a permanent commitment rather than an introductory one.

What it does not do: scheduling, lead capture forms, time tracking, or client-side project management. Those are real parts of what HoneyBook and Dubsado sell, and if you need them, you need them.

North's own pricing is not published yet, so this post cannot put it in the table above, and a comparison that quietly implies free would be exactly the sort of thing the rest of this page is complaining about.

If you want the wider stack question rather than these three, the tools argument is next door.