What mixing engineers need from their software, from sources outside FreshBooks and outside Nexa:
Disclosure: we make Nexa, so weigh this accordingly. The needs below come from public sources (SoundExchange's letter of direction (LOD) rules, the Music Modernization Act and the IRS), not from either vendor. The FreshBooks features come from its own feature list, and the Nexa facts are ours. You can check FreshBooks yourself with its 30-day free trial, which needs no credit card. FreshBooks covers the money side of a mixer's work well. The plan that does the core job, at $43 a month, has invoicing, time tracking, a client portal, a mobile app, bank reconciliation, financial reports, receipt scanning and accountant access. That suits lumpy per-project fees and the quarterly estimated tax a contractor owes when no employer withholds anything. Nothing in its feature list covers what sets a mixer apart. It can't show whether an LOD is on file for a recording. It can't link a flat fee to a royalty share. It has no home for stems, session notes and console photos with a revision history per song. The LOD gap costs the most. A mixer can't file one alone, and an LOD isn't retroactive unless it says so, so a missing one generally can't be fixed after the project. Also, the 50-client Plus cap counts archived clients, so don't make each song its own client to work around the missing records.
Nexa has the same billing base: invoices, estimates and proposals, a client pay portal, time tracking, expenses, bank reconciliation, profit and loss and 1099 summaries. Jobs show profit per job, and missions (projects) have sub-steps and templates. You could run one mission per song with a template step reading "LOD agreed and filed", and keep revision requests in CRM notes. That prompts you to ask for the LOD but doesn't track it. Nexa has no LOD status field, no link between a fee and a royalty share, and no place to store session files per song. Its limits are practical too. Card payments go only through your own Stripe account, and PayPal is only a label for a payment you record by hand. There is no QuickBooks or Xero sync, so your accountant gets exports, not a live connection. Any automated emails you set up send only while Nexa is open on one of your devices. It is software you own and run, with no hosted support desk or vendor-run onboarding, and without Cloud Sync it runs on one device.
Over three years FreshBooks at $43 a month costs $1,548 ($516 a year). Nexa is $279 once (or 3 payments of $99), or $458.64 in total with Cloud Sync at $4.99 a month for all 36 months. That saving is real, but it doesn't touch the rights records, because neither tool holds them. What closes that gap is a separate per-recording records tool, such as a database or structured spreadsheet with one row per song. Its columns should be: LOD status, date filed and who signed it; whether the LOD covers past work; the fee; any royalty share; and links to stems (grouped by instrument, effects kept with their source), session notes, console photos and the revision log. Keep invoicing and tax set-aside in whichever billing tool you already use. If you're on FreshBooks and rely on its accountant access or phone support, stay. Switching gains you nothing on rights. If you work from one device, don't need a live accountant connection and want to own your software, Nexa is the cheaper billing tool. Either way, ask for the LOD before the mix starts.
Our read for mixing engineers: Neither tool tracks LODs, fee-to-royalty links or per-song recall files, which are the mixer's core records, so add a per-recording records tracker and keep whichever billing tool you already use.
Read on each linked page in October 2026. Check them again before you decide; vendors change plans often.
FreshBooks costs mixing engineers $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 mixing engineers: Neither FreshBooks nor Nexa is the main system for this work; start with software built for it. Nexa only makes sense beside it, at $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 mixing engineer: 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 Mixing Engineer 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 mixing engineers. You own it like you own your Pro Tools Ultimate or Logic Pro with a heavy plugin chain.
An honest fit check — because the wrong tool is worse than no tool.
The honest fit: if you're a solo or small mixing engineers 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.
You open the session a band sent overnight and immediately hit the usual: 38 tracks, half of them clipping, the lead vocal recorded at -3dB, and no notes about what they want. You import, gain-stage, color-code, and route everything to busses before you make a single creative move. By mid-morning you're carving the low end so the kick and the 808 stop fighting, automating the vocal so it rides above a wall of guitars. The artist texts a voice memo: 'can it slap more.' You bounce mix v4, upload it to the review link, and start a different project while you wait. The afternoon is a different genre entirely, a folk record that needs space and air instead of loudness, and your ears have to reset. The band on the first project comes back wanting the snare 'like the demo' which was an entirely different snare. You're on revision six of a quoted two. You bounce, label, and archive every version, then send a note that further changes are billable, bracing for the pushback. End of day you reconcile which mixes were approved and realize one client never confirmed the version that already went to the duplicator.
Real mixing engineers near you who run their business on Nexa — book directly, no platform fee. Are you a mixing engineer? Post your business and get found in your area — $2.99 one-time. Or browse every mixing engineer on Nexa →
The tools of the trade — each a one-time buy that earns its keep for years.
You paid for these once because good tools last. That's the bar your software should clear too — priced like a tool you own, $279 once, not a subscription that costs more than your kit every year.
We build a mixing engineer'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 mixing engineer — 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 mixing engineers 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 mixing engineers, 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