What embroidery sellers need from their software, from sources outside FreshBooks and outside Nexa:
FreshBooks covers the general work of an embroidery shop well. It has professional invoice templates, a client portal, expense handling, time tracking, an excellent mobile app, and an interface that suits non-accountants. Its Plus plan adds proposals, receipt scanning, bank reconciliation and accountant access. Its support is hosted, with free phone and email during the trial. What its listed features do not show is anything specific to this trade. They don't name stitch-count pricing, a one-time digitizing fee, or a flag for "sold a finished item" versus "decorated the customer's own item." That flag decides sales tax, and rulings differ by state. Virginia treats monogramming on an article you sell as part of the taxable price. Kansas, in a ruling that binds only the retailer who asked, treated design fees and per-item application fees differently. So the shop has to build this itself with separate line items for design, digitizing and per-item application, plus a note on each quote. The client cap is a second problem for a shop with many one-off customers. Lite covers 5 billable clients and Plus covers 50. Archived clients count toward the cap, so you keep deleting old customers to free slots, unless you move to a plan with unlimited clients.
Nexa has the same gap and should not be read as the embroidery-specific answer. Its listed features don't include stitch-count pricing or a taxable-versus-decoration-only flag either. What it does offer is a workable base. Quotes and estimates convert to invoices, and clients can sign estimates and pay by card through your own Stripe account. It tracks sales tax and expenses, scans receipts, supports purchase orders, and keeps a simple stock count per product. Jobs carry costing and profit per job, which helps you see whether a low-quantity order paid for its digitizing time. All of it works offline. As with FreshBooks, you would record stitch count, design versus application lines and the finished-versus-customer-supplied distinction yourself in line items and notes. Business purchases would need their own expense categories, kept apart from purchases for resale. The limits matter. Nexa has no point-of-sale or card reader, no QuickBooks or Xero sync, no app marketplace, and no vendor-run support desk, since you own and run it. It does not run payroll: no payroll taxes, pay stubs or direct deposit. Its stock count is not full inventory management, with no reorder points or valuation, so tracking blank garments by size and color would be rough. Clients have no street-address field. It runs on one device unless you add Cloud Sync. Any automated emails, such as reminders or sequences, send only while Nexa is open on one of your devices.
Over three years FreshBooks at $43 a month comes to $1,548 ($516 a year). Nexa is $279 once, or 3 payments of $99, and $458.64 over three years if you add Cloud Sync at $4.99 a month. A shop that needs payroll, a hosted support line, a mobile app, or connected apps should stay with FreshBooks. So should one that wants an accountant to work in the same system, or that has many customers and would rather not manage client slots. A shop with simple needs can reasonably move to Nexa. That means one owner on one device, wanting quotes, invoices, card payments, tax and expense records, and job profit, and comfortable keeping its own tax notes. Before choosing either, ask your state's revenue department or an accountant how your shop's work is taxed. Neither tool will decide that for you.
Our read for embroidery sellers: Neither tool handles stitch counts or the finished-item-versus-decoration tax distinction, so choose on support, payroll and cost: stay with FreshBooks if you need hosted support or payroll, and consider Nexa if a lean single-device setup is enough.
Read on each linked page in October 2026. Check them again before you decide; vendors change plans often.
FreshBooks costs embroidery sellers $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 embroidery sellers: 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.
The books 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 actual work — it automates the business around it. And that part is the same for every embroidery seller: 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 actual work. Tap a step to see what gets automated.
A lead, a call, a referral — and a quote or estimate that turns it into a booked job.
The part you actually get paid for — with the time, materials, add-ons, and tasks tracked as you go, not guessed at later.
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 actual 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 embroidery seller'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 Embroidery Seller earns $32,000/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 embroidery sellers. You own it like you own your a multi-needle commercial embroidery machine with assorted hoops.
An honest fit check — because the wrong tool is worse than no tool.
The honest fit: if you're a solo or small embroidery sellers 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.
The books 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 day starts at the screen, not the machine: a new customer sent a logo as a low-res JPG, so it has to be cleaned up and digitized into a stitch file, choosing the right underlay and pull compensation so it doesn't pucker on a knit polo. A test stitch-out on scrap confirms the density before any real blank gets hooped. The middle of the day is the machine running: hooping caps with the right stabilizer, loading the design, changing thread cones at each color stop, and trimming jumps while keeping an ear out for a thread break that can ruin a piece. A personalized batch needs attention because each beanie has a different name, and one misspelled monogram means a wasted blank and an unhappy customer. The afternoon brings a rush order, twenty-four polos for a local business, so the math is stitch count times pieces times the hourly machine time, plus the digitizing already done. Backing gets torn or cut away from finished pieces, threads get trimmed clean, and everything gets pressed and folded. Online orders ship out, and a reorder request comes in for a logo digitized months ago, which has to be found. A box of blank totes arrives and goes into inventory. The day ends reconciling blanks used against blanks bought and pricing the next quote so the digitizing time finally stops being free.
Real embroidery sellers near you who run their business on Nexa — book directly, no platform fee. Are you an embroidery seller? Post your business and get found in your area — $2.99 one-time. Or browse every embroidery seller 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 $9,590–$38,800 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 embroidery seller'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 embroidery seller — 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 embroidery sellers 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 embroidery sellers, 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