What e book 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 have not run either product on a real ebook job, and this read rests on published feature lists, the Editorial Freelancers Association rate chart and one Adobe community answer, which is a forum post and not license text. Ebook work has a few billing quirks that a feature list can't settle for you. The EFA chart prices eBook layout both by the hour and by the page, at 7.5 to 22.5 pages per hour. It lists eBook graphic design as a separate line with a lower hourly range, and it says members' rates vary considerably. So a sensible quote has a per-page layout line plus an hourly or flat design line. Reflowable EPUB and fixed-layout or PDF editions are different deliverables, so one title often needs two line items. Each project also needs a font-license record. The Adobe answer says the license text controls what you may embed, that Adobe fonts in an EPUB need subsetted and obfuscated data, and that other vendors' terms may differ. Neither product lists a per-page rate or a font-license field, so in both you would enter page count times your rate as a line item and keep the license note elsewhere. Check any of this against your own contracts, not just our summary.
FreshBooks covers the billing side well. It has built-in time tracking, professional invoice templates, a client portal and a mobile app. Plus adds proposals and retainers, which suit quoting a book and collecting a deposit before layout starts. Premium adds project profitability, which is the check a per-page quote needs: divide pages by your pages per hour for expected hours, then compare with logged hours. Free phone and email support is part of the trial. The catch is the Lite plan, which covers only 5 billable clients and counts archived clients toward the cap. A designer with many past publishers must delete clients to free slots. Nexa has proposals that convert to invoices, time tracking, and jobs with costing and profit per job, so it can run the same hours check. Its missions with sub-steps and templates could carry a standing confirm-font-license step on every book, which is a workaround and not a record. Nexa has no retainers, no QuickBooks or Xero sync, no app marketplace and no hosted support desk, because you own and run it yourself. Card payments go only through your own Stripe account. Its automated emails, such as reminders and sequences, send only while Nexa is open on one of your devices. Without optional Cloud Sync it runs on one device.
Over three years, FreshBooks at $43 a month is $516 a year, or $1,548. Nexa is $279 once (or 3 payments of $99), or $458.64 if you add Cloud Sync at $4.99 a month for all 36 months. Nexa costs far less, but it adds nothing ebook-specific that FreshBooks lacks, and FreshBooks has retainers for deposits plus vendor-run support. Stay with FreshBooks if you take deposits before layout, invoice from your phone, want vendor support, or need client emails to go out while your computer is off. Consider Nexa if you work from one machine, take card payments through Stripe, track profit per book, and can support yourself. With either, read the font license text itself before you embed a font, and keep a per-project note of what it allows.
Our read for e book designers: Stay with FreshBooks if you rely on retainers for deposits, vendor support or emails that send while your computer is off; Nexa is a cheaper fit only for a solo, single-machine designer who can support themself.
Read on each linked page in October 2026. Check them again before you decide; vendors change plans often.
FreshBooks costs e book 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 e book designers: Stay with FreshBooks if the needs in our read above apply to you. If they don't, Nexa covers the core invoicing, scheduling and books for $279 once against $1,548 for FreshBooks over three years.
Time tracking, invoicing, client records and scheduling 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 e-book 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.)
FreshBooks plus whatever else you're paying for:
Email yourself this comparison?
The median E-Book Designer earns $45,000/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 e book designers. You own it like you own your Adobe InDesign.
An honest fit check — because the wrong tool is worse than no tool.
The honest fit: if you're a solo or small e book 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.
Time tracking, invoicing, client records and scheduling 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.
The first thing I do with any new manuscript is clean it, because authors send Word files held together with manual tabs, five different ways of starting a chapter, and stray double spaces that will haunt the typeset. I set up a proper InDesign document with master pages, paragraph and character styles, and a baseline grid so the body text sits consistently page after page. Midday I'm flowing the cleaned text, fixing widows and orphans, and making sure chapter openers, running heads, and the table of contents all behave. Then comes the part authors never anticipate: a beautiful fixed print layout has to become a reflowable EPUB, so I export, run it through validation, and fix the markup so it doesn't fall apart when a reader bumps the font size up. The afternoon is device testing, previewing the same file on Kindle, Apple Books, and Kobo because each engine renders spacing and fonts differently, and 'it looks fine on mine' has burned me before. Late in the day the author asks whether I can also do a large-print PDF and a print-ready interior 'since it's basically the same book,' and I gently explain those are separate builds. Before I deliver I validate the EPUB one more time and package the print PDF with the right bleed and margins for their printer.
Real e book designers near you who run their business on Nexa — book directly, no platform fee. Are you an e-book designer? Post your business and get found in your area — $2.99 one-time. Or browse every e-book designer 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 $2,700–$9,700 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 an e-book 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 e-book 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 e book 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 e book 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