What baby shower planners need from their software, from sources outside FreshBooks and outside Nexa:
FreshBooks covers the billing side of a shower planner's work. Deposits and balances can go through retainers and professional invoice templates, and a client portal lets a host pay or review a quote. Time tracking and a strong mobile app suit weekend venue visits, and receipt scanning helps with vendor purchases. Two needs are not confirmed in its feature list. California treats planning fees as taxable when they are charged alongside food or décor, so a mixed package needs invoice lines that separate taxable and non-taxable items. A planner who buys catering or décor for resale also needs records of which purchases carried a resale certificate and which were for the planner's own use, because use tax is due on anything bought untaxed and not resold. The list names neither, so test both in the 30-day free trial with a real package. FreshBooks also has no scheduler for overlapping shower dates. Its client caps also bite a busy planner: Lite allows 5 clients, archived clients count, and Plus allows 50.
Nexa has more of the planning workflow. A booking page with intake forms can take consultation requests. Proposals convert to invoices. Payment plans suit deposit-and-balance schedules. Jobs show profit per job, and a task board and missions with sub-steps and templates can hold vendor deadlines for several showers at once. It also has sales tax tracking, purchase orders, expenses and bank reconciliation, and it works offline in venues with poor signal. Its limits are real. Reminders and drip emails send only while Nexa is open on one of your devices, so a closed laptop means a silent reminder. Card payments go only through your own Stripe account. There is no Google Calendar sync, only an .ics export, and no recurring booking series or job templates. It is software you run yourself, with no hosted support desk or vendor-run onboarding. Its listed features do not mention resale-certificate tracking either, so you would have to confirm that before relying on it.
Over three years FreshBooks at $43 a month is $1,548 ($516 a year). Nexa is $279 once, or 3 payments of $99, and without Cloud Sync it runs on one device. Adding Cloud Sync at $4.99 a month brings the three-year total to $458.64. If you want phone and email support, a vendor that keeps client emails and the portal running whether or not your laptop is open, and a plan with unlimited clients, stay with FreshBooks. If you work from one device, are comfortable keeping Nexa open for reminders and want the lower cost, Nexa is a reasonable switch. Either way, run one real package that mixes food, décor and a planning fee through the tax and resale records before you commit.
Our read for baby shower planners: Neither tool is confirmed to handle California resale and mixed taxable invoices, so stay with FreshBooks if you need hosted support and always-on client emails, and switch to Nexa if you work from one device and want the lower three-year cost.
Read on each linked page in October 2026. Check them again before you decide; vendors change plans often.
FreshBooks costs baby shower planners $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 baby shower planners: 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.
Client records, scheduling and invoicing 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. 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 baby shower planner: 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 baby shower planner'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 Baby Shower Planner earns $42,000/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 baby shower planners. You own it like you own your a themed décor and balloon-garland kit.
An honest fit check — because the wrong tool is worse than no tool.
The honest fit: if you're a solo or small baby shower planners 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.
Client records, scheduling and invoicing 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.
A baby shower has a softness to it that hides real logistics, and the planner's job is to make a tender afternoon look effortless. Much of the work is theme execution: the client wanted sage green and gold with a celestial touch, so you're matching the balloon garland, the dessert table, the cake topper, and the favor tags to that exact palette, because the photos are half the point and a clashing pink balloon ruins the set. If it's a surprise, there's a whole layer of secrecy, coordinating the timing with the partner so the guest of honor arrives after everyone's hidden, and keeping the venue and the host from spoiling it. You build a grazing board and a dessert table that look abundant but account for the mom-to-be's dietary needs, no soft cheese, nothing she's been told to avoid, and you make sure the seating is comfortable because a pregnant guest of honor isn't standing for two hours. Midday the RSVPs shift, two more cousins are coming, one family dropped out, and that ripples into favor counts and how many slices of cake you need. You set up the games and the favors, stage the gift table near the registry display, and on the day you're steaming the backdrop, inflating the last balloons, and orchestrating the surprise reveal so the first thing mom sees is exactly the room she pictured.
Real baby shower planners near you who run their business on Nexa — book directly, no platform fee. Are you a baby shower planner? Post your business and get found in your area — $2.99 one-time. Or browse every baby shower planner on Nexa →
The tools of the trade — each a one-time buy that earns its keep for years.
Here's the bar that matters: you spent $760–$3,500 on tools that last for years, and never thought twice. So why should the software cost more than your whole kit — every single year? Hold it to the same standard as a good tool: $279, once.
We build a baby shower planner'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 baby shower planner — 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 baby shower planners 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 baby shower planners, 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