What vjs (video jockeys) need from their software, from sources outside FreshBooks and outside Nexa:
FreshBooks handles the money side of a VJ business well. It has invoice templates, a client portal, built-in time tracking, expense tracking with receipt scanning on Plus, and proposals on Plus, so a booking can go from quote to paid invoice. It's easy to use without an accountant, and the trial and money-back guarantee make it low-risk to test. What its feature list doesn't show is a place to log the license status of each clip, loop and track. It also lists no contract template for who owns the visuals and what a festival may stream or upload, no record of sets that contain unlicensed footage, and no asset register for gear purchases or Form 4562 tax treatment. Its expense and mileage-style records can support a trip log, but the tax rules for performer travel should be checked against current IRS guidance.
Nexa covers a similar business ground. It has estimates and proposals that clients can sign and convert to invoices, a client pay portal through your own Stripe account, expenses with receipt scanning, bank reconciliation, a balance sheet, profit and loss, and jobs with costing and profit per job. It runs offline. It also lacks what a VJ needs most: it has no clip rights register, no ownership or usage-rights contract template, and no fixed-asset register for gear depreciation or section 179 tracking. It has no QuickBooks or Xero sync, and it has no hosted support desk or vendor-run onboarding because you own and run the software yourself. If you use its automated emails, they send only while Nexa is open on one of your devices.
Over three years FreshBooks costs $1,548 at $43 a month ($516 a year). Nexa costs $279 once, or $458.64 with Cloud Sync at $4.99 a month for the same period. Nexa is clearly cheaper, but the savings don't fix the gap. Keep your current invoicing tool, whichever it is, and add a purpose-built rights and licensing tracker for clips, plus a fixed-asset register for gear. A good rights tracker would also hold your visuals-ownership agreement and the footage-risk notes. Switching accounting tools only makes sense if you want the lower cost and are fine owning and running the software yourself.
Our read for vjs (video jockeys): Neither tool tracks clip licenses, visuals-ownership agreements or gear depreciation, so a VJ needs a dedicated rights-management tool plus a fixed-asset register alongside whichever invoicing tool they keep.
Read on each linked page in October 2026. Check them again before you decide; vendors change plans often.
FreshBooks costs vjs (video jockeys) $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 vjs (video jockeys): 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.
Scheduling, invoicing and client records 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 vj: 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 vj'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 VJ earns $35,000/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 vjs (video jockeys). You own it like you own your Projectors and LED panels.
An honest fit check — because the wrong tool is worse than no tool.
The honest fit: if you're a solo or small vjs (video jockeys) 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.
Your people are already online — swapping real numbers, tool picks, and war stories. Here's where to find them.
Active community — tool picks, pricing, and day-to-day questions.
Open on Reddit →Active community — tool picks, pricing, and day-to-day questions.
Open on Reddit →Active community — tool picks, pricing, and day-to-day questions.
Open on Reddit →Scheduling, invoicing and client records 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.
Saturday starts with a load-in list. Tonight is a private event with projection mapping onto the front of a converted warehouse, $800 plus $200 in rented screens, so I'm checking the laptop, the capture card, the MIDI controller, spare HDMI and SDI runs, the lens for the throw distance and my own projector, whose lamp is down to about 500 hours. I pick the rental screens up at 2 and inspect them for tears before I sign. At 4 I'm on site measuring the facade, setting the projector on a scaffold and taping cables down where people will walk. Once it's dark enough I build the map: warping corners onto the window frames, masking the doors, lining up edges so the loops I rendered last week fit the architecture. I test clips against the DJ's opening track and fix a loop that stutters at the seam. During the event I'm triggering clips live, matching tempo, and layering the logos the client sent in the wrong format, which I recut this afternoon. Last night was a club set, $400, house visuals on the LED wall, and I got home at 4. Tonight wraps at 1, strike takes an hour, and the rented screens go back Monday. Sunday I sleep, then send two invoices from last weekend that I forgot, note which venue still hasn't paid for September, and look up what a replacement lamp costs, because I know I haven't been pricing its hours into my rates.
Real vjs (video jockeys) near you who run their business on Nexa — book directly, no platform fee. Are you a vj? Post your business and get found in your area — $2.99 one-time. Or browse every vj 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 vj'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 vj — 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 vjs (video jockeys) 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 vjs (video jockeys), 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