What ui artists need from their software, from sources outside FreshBooks and outside Nexa:
We publish Nexa and haven't tested either product. Everything below comes from the vendors' feature lists, so check it against a trial before you act. For a UI artist, the job record has to hold more than hours and an amount. A licence for one app's screens is a different sale from a licence for the same screens and icon set reused on a second platform or by a parent company. To quote the reuse or extension, you need a record of the licensed deliverables, term, territory and client type. Signed agreements also have to be findable by client and project, because work made for hire needs one of nine statutory categories and a written instrument signed by both parties. FreshBooks covers the money side well: proposals on Plus and up, invoice templates, a client portal, time tracking and a mobile app. Plus adds receipt scanning, bank reconciliation, financial reports and accountant access. That separates income from deductible expenses for Schedule C and Schedule SE and lets a preparer work on 1040-ES estimates. It lists no usage-rights field, no agreement store and no estimated-tax calculator. Its client caps also matter, because UI work often brings one-off clients: Lite allows 5 and Plus allows 50. Archived clients count until you delete them.
Nexa's list is close on bookkeeping: estimates and proposals that convert to invoices, estimates clients sign in the pay portal, expenses, receipt scanning, bank reconciliation, profit and loss, and a balance sheet. Two features suit design work. Jobs show cost and profit per job, which tells you whether a flat fee for a screen set covered your hours. Missions with one level of sub-steps and templates can hold phases such as wireframes, visual design and handoff. The CRM's tags and notes are the nearest thing to a place for licence terms, but they are free text, not a rights register, so you couldn't filter for licences expiring or for reuse already granted. A signed estimate records a client's acceptance of a quote. We can't say it meets the written-instrument test for work made for hire, so have a lawyer or the Graphic Artists Guild's contract guidance settle that. Nexa has no QuickBooks or Xero sync, no accountant-access feature on its list, and no hosted support or onboarding, because you own and run the software. It runs on one device unless you add Cloud Sync. Its automated emails, including payment reminders, send only while Nexa is open on one of your devices.
Over three years, FreshBooks at $43 a 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 a month. That gap is real, but it's all in bookkeeping, and neither tool holds licence terms in a structured way. If you're already on FreshBooks, stay. Accountant access and hosted support are what a freelancer relies on at quarterly-estimate time, and Nexa lacks both. Nexa suits a new solo artist who works from one device, wants per-job profit and will support their own software. Whichever you use, keep a separate licence log, with one row per deliverable and columns for scope, term, territory and client type, next to a folder of signed agreements indexed by client and project. Have an accountant set up the quarterly payments.
Our read for ui artists: Stay with FreshBooks if you already use it, since accountant access and hosted support matter more to this trade than Nexa's lower price, and keep licence terms in a separate log either way.
Read on each linked page in October 2026. Check them again before you decide; vendors change plans often.
FreshBooks costs ui artists $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 ui artists: Stay with FreshBooks if the needs in our read above apply to you. If they don't, Nexa covers the core invoicing, scheduling and books for $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 ui artist: 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 ui artist'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 UI Artist 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 ui artists. You own it like you own your Figma with auto-layout and component libraries.
An honest fit check — because the wrong tool is worse than no tool.
The honest fit: if you're a solo or small ui artists 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 Figma to the game's inventory screen, which the client described as 'simple,' and immediately the questions start: what does a slot look like when it's empty, hovered, selected, locked, or holding a stacked item? You build the component with all its states because that's the actual job, even though the brief only pictured one. Mid-morning is the icon set, drawing a consistent family of inventory icons in Illustrator at a base grid so they stay crisp when scaled down to the in-game size. The art director asks to 'just make the gold a little warmer,' which lives in a shared color style, so the change ripples through every screen and you check each one. Afternoon is motion: a quick After Effects mockup showing how the panel slides and the items settle, because static screens never communicate feel. Around three the producer mentions the game is shipping in five languages, and you realize the German strings will blow out the button widths, so you flag the relayout. Late day is asset export, slicing every element at the densities the engine needs, naming files to the engine's convention, and updating your tracker with the localization relayout and the multi-state component work so the per-screen quote reflects the states that actually got built.
Real ui artists near you who run their business on Nexa — book directly, no platform fee. Are you an ui artist? Post your business and get found in your area — $2.99 one-time. Or browse every ui artist 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 an ui artist'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 ui artist — 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 ui artists 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 ui artists, 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