What technical illustrators need from their software, from sources outside FreshBooks and outside Nexa:
Disclosure: the publisher makes Nexa, and everything here comes from each vendor's own feature list, not independent testing. Billing software and rights management are different jobs, and a technical illustrator needs both. FreshBooks covers the billing side well. It has professional invoice templates, a client portal, built-in time tracking, a mobile app, and free phone and email support during the trial. Plus adds proposals, retainers, receipt scanning, financial reports and accountant access, which help with self-employment tax (Schedule SE) and quarterly estimates (Form 1040-ES). Its feature list shows nothing that calculates those estimates. Repeat clients are the income base for freelance artists, so the client cap matters: Lite allows 5 clients and Plus allows 50, and archived clients count until you delete them. The legal needs specific to your trade are outside what FreshBooks lists. Under 17 U.S.C. § 412, your remedies for a misused drawing depend on each work's registration date against its first-publication date, and its feature list has no per-work field for either. Nor does it list anywhere to store a job's signed rights terms. A commissioned illustration is work made for hire only if it falls in a listed category (for example a contribution to a collective work, a compilation or an atlas) and both parties sign a written agreement. Otherwise you keep copyright unless you assign it in writing.
Nexa has the same gap. It has no register of works and no registration-date field, and a client record has no street-address field. A tag or note could hold a job's rights terms, but that is a workaround, not a rights record, and it will not alert you to the three-month registration window. What Nexa does cover is the billing and client side. It has estimates, quotes and proposals that convert to invoices, recurring invoices, payment plans, and a client pay portal through your own Stripe account. Its CRM has a pipeline board, tags and notes for tracking repeat clients. It also has time tracking, expenses, receipt scanning, bank reconciliation and profit and loss. It does not compute estimated tax. It lacks the support and connections FreshBooks offers: no hosted support desk or vendor-run onboarding, no QuickBooks or Xero sync, no app marketplace, and no accountant-access feature. It runs on one device unless you add Cloud Sync. Any automated emails or reminders, such as payment reminders, send only while Nexa is open on one of your devices.
Over three years FreshBooks at $43/month costs $1,548 ($516 a year). Nexa costs $279 once (or 3 payments of $99), or $458.64 with Cloud Sync at $4.99/month. If you already invoice happily in FreshBooks and use its support, mobile app or accountant access, the price gap alone is a weak reason to move, since Nexa lacks those. If you work with a modest set of clients, can support yourself, and want to stop paying monthly, Nexa covers the billing side for less. Neither tool addresses the need that decides your legal remedies, so do not choose between them on that basis. Keep a works register, which is a rights-management database or a spreadsheet. Give each drawing one row holding its first-publication date, its registration filing date, and a link to the signed terms (work-for-hire designation or written assignment). Add the client's name to each row. Register published work within three months of first publication, and register unpublished work before anyone misuses it.
Our read for technical illustrators: Neither tool tracks per-work registration dates or signed rights terms, so a works register (a rights-management database or spreadsheet) is the tool you need, and the billing choice is secondary: stay with FreshBooks if you rely on its support or accountant access, otherwise Nexa is the cheaper option.
Read on each linked page in October 2026. Check them again before you decide; vendors change plans often.
FreshBooks costs technical illustrators $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 technical illustrators: 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 technical illustrator: 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 technical illustrator'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 technical illustrator 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 technical illustrators. You own it like you own your A pen-display tablet and stylus for precision line work.
An honest fit check — because the wrong tool is worse than no tool.
The honest fit: if you're a solo or small technical illustrators 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 start by opening the source CAD a client sent and rotating the 3D model to figure out the cleanest angle for an exploded view, because a technical illustration lives or dies on whether someone can actually see how the parts fit together. Most of the morning is precise vector work, tracing geometry into clean line art, setting consistent line weights so the foreground reads against the background, placing leader lines and callout numbers that match the parts list exactly, because a mislabeled callout in an assembly manual is a real-world repair gone wrong. An engineer emails an updated CAD file, and your stomach drops a little because the bracket they moved means the exploded view you finished yesterday is now wrong and has to be redrawn. You handle a client revision that just says 'make it clearer,' which you translate into tightening line weights and re-spacing the callouts, all while keeping every dimension honest. Midday you scope a new quote, trying to count the views and callouts a 'simple' diagram will really need before it bites you. Afternoon is more illustration, syncing the part numbers against the latest BOM, exporting clean files in the formats the client's manual needs, and flagging that a parts diagram has quietly grown into something that needs a contract conversation before you keep going.
Real technical illustrators near you who run their business on Nexa — book directly, no platform fee. Are you a technical illustrator? Post your business and get found in your area — $2.99 one-time. Or browse every technical illustrator 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 $2,480–$10,050 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 technical illustrator'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 technical illustrator — 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 technical illustrators 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 technical illustrators, 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