What tattoo designers need from their software, from sources outside FreshBooks and outside Nexa:
FreshBooks handles the money side of a tattoo business well. It has professional invoice templates, a client portal, built-in time tracking, an excellent mobile app, and it's easy to use if you aren't an accountant. The $43/month plan covers the core invoicing job. Its client count includes archived clients, though, and the lower plans cap how many you can hold. Tattoo regulators expect records kept for years, so deleting old clients to free a slot works against that. The feature list also shows nothing for what the trade's records actually require: ID type and date of birth, ink colors with manufacturer catalog numbers, body location, a copy of the ID, or a signed statement that the client understood the care instructions. Nothing in it covers guest-artist or convention paperwork either, such as licenses, promoter permits and consent forms kept for two years after an event.
Nexa covers more of the client-facing workflow. It has a public booking page with intake forms, a CRM with notes and tags, estimates that clients can sign, invoices, a Stripe-based pay portal, expenses, bank reconciliation, profit and loss and 1099 summaries. It has no tattoo-specific record fields, and a client record has no street-address field, which a regulator-ready record needs. Nexa also has no support desk or vendor-run onboarding. It is software you run yourself. Any automated emails, such as booking and review reminders, send only while Nexa is open on one of your devices. Card payments go only through your own Stripe account. Nexa has no text messaging, no QuickBooks or Xero sync, and no Google Calendar sync.
Over three years FreshBooks at $43/month comes to $1,548 ($516 a year). Nexa is $279 once, or $458.64 with the optional $4.99/month Cloud Sync, and without sync it runs on one device only. If you only need invoicing and bookkeeping, Nexa is the cheaper way to get it. Stay with FreshBooks if you rely on its support and mobile app. Neither tool replaces what the law asks of a studio. Keep the age and ID checks, ink lot details, signed care acknowledgments and event paperwork in a dedicated tattoo-studio records and consent-form tool, and use either product only for billing.
Our read for tattoo designers: Neither product carries the tattoo-specific client records, consent forms and guest or convention paperwork the trade needs, so use a studio records and consent-form tool for that and either product only for billing.
Neither product on this page is built for it. These kinds of software are. The examples are not ours and these are plain links, not affiliate links; each goes to the product's own page for that capability.
Read on each linked page in October 2026. Check them again before you decide; vendors change plans often.
FreshBooks costs tattoo 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 tattoo designers: Neither FreshBooks nor Nexa is the main system for this work; start with the specialist software above. 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 tattoo 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 tattoo 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 Tattoo 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 tattoo designers. You own it like you own your an iPad Pro with Apple Pencil running Procreate (with tattoo stencil brushes).
An honest fit check — because the wrong tool is worse than no tool.
The honest fit: if you're a solo or small tattoo 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.
A custom tattoo starts with translation, because a client walks in with a Pinterest board of ten different styles, a quote in a font that won't survive on skin, and 'you'll know what I mean.' I spend the consultation pinning down what they actually want, the meaning, the placement, the size, and managing the expectation that some of those references simply won't work as a tattoo. Then I research and gather reference, and start sketching the linework on the iPad, designing for skin first: bold readable lines and enough negative space, because I know fine detail and tiny lettering blur and blow out as the tattoo ages and the ink spreads over years. I build the composition to flow with the body part it's going on, a sleeve has to wrap, a ribcage piece has to follow the curve. Midday I present the draft on a tablet and walk them through why I simplified that delicate filigree they loved. The afternoon brings the placement curveball, they decide they want the forearm design on their calf instead, which means reworking the proportions and flow for a totally different surface. Before the appointment I print the stencil at exact size and test the transfer, because a stencil that smears or sits crooked ruins the session. The recurring sting is the no-shows and the people who take my custom drawing to a cheaper shop after a 'free' consult.
Real tattoo designers near you who run their business on Nexa — book directly, no platform fee. Are you a tattoo designer? Post your business and get found in your area — $2.99 one-time. Or browse every tattoo 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 $2,100–$8,530 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 tattoo 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 tattoo 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 tattoo 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 tattoo 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