What the freelance business tools actually cost, with the date we checked

Software prices move, and a price without the date it was read is a rumour with a decimal point. Everything below was read from the company's own pricing page on the day stated. Where a figure is not on the page, the table says so instead of guessing.

The prices

| Tool | Checked | Tiers | The tier that includes proposals, contracts and invoicing | Card payment fees | |---|---|---|---|---| | HoneyBook | 11 Aug 2026 | Starter $29, Essentials $49, Premium $109 a month billed yearly; monthly $29 / $59 / $129 | Starter | 2.7% + 10¢ cards; 1.5% bank transfer | | Dubsado | 11 Aug 2026 | Starter $335/yr, Premier $525/yr; no monthly price published; extra brand $10/mo; extra users $25–$60/mo by band | Starter | not stated on the pricing page | | Bonsai | 11 Aug 2026 | Basic $9, Essentials $19, Premium $29, Elite $49 per user/mo billed annually; monthly $15 / $25 / $39 / $59 | Essentials, not Basic | not stated on the pricing page | | Moxie | 29 Aug 2026 | Starter $10/mo, Pro $20/mo, Teams $32/mo billed annually; monthly $12 / $25 / $40 | all three list them | not stated on the pricing page | | Wave | 29 Aug 2026 | Starter free; Pro $19/mo or $190/yr; Wave Advisors from $149/mo | none drafts proposals or contracts; invoicing is on the free plan | 2.9% + $0.60 cards, 3.4% + $0.60 Amex; Pro waives the $0.60 on the first ten transactions a month | | North | 29 Aug 2026 | Free (forever); Pro $39/month; accounts created before launch keep $20/month | Free | Stripe's own fee, on your own Stripe account; North adds nothing |

North is free in full while it is in beta. The two plans are the launch shape, published early, and the reasoning and the ten commitments are on the pricing page.

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 the Basic tier does not include proposals, contracts or invoicing. The real comparison point is Essentials.

Dubsado's monthly price does not exist. Articles quote one anyway. The company publishes annual prices only and says annual saves the equivalent of two months, so any monthly Dubsado figure you read was inferred by the writer, which is a reasonable estimate and not a fact.

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

What we could not print

FreshBooks. On the day we checked, its pricing page was running a 90% off for three months promotion, and the regular prices could not be read cleanly from it. The five-client cap on its Lite tier and the fifty-client cap on Plus were legible; the standing monthly prices were not. Rather than quote a promotional figure as a price, we left it out. If you are comparing against FreshBooks, read its page on a day without a banner.

Processing fees for Dubsado, Bonsai and Moxie. None of the three states a card-processing fee on its pricing page. They may be on a help page or set by the processor each connects to; we did not go looking beyond the pricing page, so those cells say "not stated" rather than a number from somewhere else.

Whether Wave's free plan leaves Wave's branding on the invoice. It has been reported that way, and we did not re-verify it from the pricing page, so it is not in the table.

The referral money, which explains the roundups

This is the flat paragraph, and it is the one to keep. When you search for "best tools for freelancers" and get a list of twelve, several of the twelve pay the writer.

HoneyBook publishes its referral terms: $50 for each qualified referral that stays subscribed and in good standing for 100 days, rising to $200 for an Unlimited-plan purchase where the referrer has themselves transacted $2,000 or more, capped at $10,000 a year for members outside its educator programme, on a 30-day cookie. Dubsado runs a mutual-discount model rather than a cash commission: the person referred gets 20% off their first month or year and the referrer gets a free month. Bonsai has a programme, and we could not verify a payout figure, so none is printed. All three checked 11 August 2026.

A referral programme is not misconduct. The citeable fact is the size of the incentive and how rarely the pages that rank disclose it. A page ranking three tools while earning two hundred dollars a signup on one of them has an interest, and it is worth knowing which tools carry one when you read a ranking. North runs no affiliate programme and has no affiliate relationship with anything named here, which is easy to say and is also the reason this table can print the prices flat.

How to read the table

The tier column matters more than the price column. What you are buying is a way to send a proposal, get a contract signed, and be paid; a tier that does not include those is a different product at a lower price.

Then the fees. Say you take $60,000 a year by card: a 2.7% platform fee of the kind HoneyBook charges (checked 11 August 2026) is about $1,620, and a processor's fee is charged whether or not the software adds one on top. The question to ask any tool is whether it takes a cut beyond the processor's, and the answer is not always on the pricing page.

Then the exit. Some of these tools will export everything you put into them when you leave, and some will hand you a locked archive and a link to sales. That is a minute's checking before you sign up and close to unanswerable afterwards.

Prices as of the dates shown. They will move.