What packaging designers need from their software, from sources outside FreshBooks and outside Nexa:
FreshBooks does the money side of packaging work well. The plan that does the core job has built-in time tracking for hourly work, proposals and retainers for quoting a project fee and billing part of it up front, professional invoice templates, a client portal, a mobile app, and accountant access. That fits a trade that sells by project and has to keep track of scope. The cost to watch is the client count. That plan covers 50 clients, and archived clients still count until you delete them. What it does not give you is the paperwork the Graphic Artists Guild tells designers to put in front of a client. It has no field for copyright usage terms (rights transferred, duration, media, geography) and no kill-fee schedule of 25% at assignment, 50% after sketch and 100% after final art. It does not check label rules such as the net quantity statement sitting in the bottom 30 percent of the principal display panel, with metric and U.S. Customary units. You would type the usage wording and stage percentages into your own invoice text. A signed assignment or work-for-hire agreement is a separate document either way.
Disclosure: Nexa's publisher wrote this page. Nexa has estimates, quotes and proposals that convert to invoices, payment plans, and a client pay portal where clients sign estimates and pay by card through your own Stripe account. It also has time tracking, jobs with costing and profit per job, expenses, bank reconciliation and receipt scanning. For a designer, payment plans plus estimate-to-invoice conversion can stage a fee across assignment, sketch and final art, but you set the percentages by hand, and the heading "copyright usage" and the rights wording go into your own text. Nexa has no usage-rights field, no label-rule checking, and no contract tool beyond a client signing an estimate, so it does not satisfy the signed-ownership requirement. It cannot sync with QuickBooks or Xero, and it has no manual journal entries, which matters if your bookkeeper works in either. It is software you own and run yourself, so there is no hosted support desk or vendor-run onboarding. Without Cloud Sync it runs on one device, and any automated emails send only while Nexa is open.
Over three years FreshBooks costs $1,548 ($43 a month, or $516 a year). Nexa costs $279 once, or 3 payments of $99. With optional Cloud Sync at $4.99 a month, the three-year total is $458.64. A solo packaging designer with a few active clients who works from one machine, writes their own usage terms and signs their own agreements can reasonably pick Nexa. Billing a staged fee is the same manual work in both tools. Stay with FreshBooks if you want a vendor support line, a mobile app for sending invoices from a client site, or an accountant who needs direct access to your books. Whichever you use, keep a usage-terms template and a signed assignment or license outside the invoicing tool, and quote the number of concepts and revisions in every estimate so that scope changes can be billed.
Our read for packaging designers: Neither tool has a usage-rights field or a kill-fee schedule, so the choice comes down to cost and support: Nexa is cheaper for a one-machine solo designer, and FreshBooks is better if you want vendor support or accountant access.
Read on each linked page in October 2026. Check them again before you decide; vendors change plans often.
FreshBooks costs packaging 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 packaging designers: 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.
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 packaging 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.)
This is the connection that makes the rest worth it. A packaging designer'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 Packaging 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 packaging designers. You own it like you own your Illustrator for dielines and structural layout.
An honest fit check — because the wrong tool is worse than no tool.
The honest fit: if you're a solo or small packaging 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.
You begin with the dieline, the unfolded blueprint of the box, because in packaging the structure comes before the pretty, and you confirm the panel dimensions against the printer's template so the art doesn't crash into a fold. Morning is laying the brand onto the unfolded box in Illustrator, constantly checking which panel becomes the front, which the side, and making sure nothing critical lands on a crease. You build a quick 3D mockup so the client can see it as an actual box, not a flat sheet. Around eleven the client's compliance person sends the legally required ingredient panel and net-weight text, longer than expected, so you carve out room on the back panel and adjust the layout. Lunch is folding a physical mockup, printing the flat, scoring it with a bone folder, and assembling it by hand to check that the art aligns across folded edges, which it doesn't quite, so you nudge it. Afternoon the printer specs land: two spot Pantones plus a soft-touch varnish and a foil logo, so you separate the art accordingly and mark the foil and varnish layers. The client mentions a second flavor is coming, which means a variant dieline, and you flag it. Late day you finalize the dieline and print files, label the spot and finish layers clearly, and update the tracker with the compliance revisions and the upcoming variant so the single-SKU quote reflects what's really happening.
Real packaging designers near you who run their business on Nexa — book directly, no platform fee. Are you a packaging designer? Post your business and get found in your area — $2.99 one-time. Or browse every packaging designer 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 packaging 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 a packaging 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 packaging 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 packaging 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