What jugglers need from their software, from sources outside HoneyBook and outside Nexa:
HoneyBook covers the booking side of juggling work well. Proposals, contracts, invoices, payments and a client portal come on every plan, and the $36/month plan adds a scheduler, automations, SMS reminders and a QuickBooks Online integration, which helps if your books live there. What its feature list doesn't show is the compliance side of the trade. That means tracking liability cover per performer and per gig, including the fire-indoors exclusion in the IJA master policy. It also means separating employee income from self-employed income for the Publication 529 performing-artist rules, and holding a council's busker-permit and interested-party requirements. You would keep those records elsewhere.
Nexa covers the money side of a juggling business more broadly than you might expect. It has invoices, estimates and proposals, a client pay portal through your own Stripe account, a public booking page with intake forms and group-class capacity, and a CRM with a public lead form. It also has expense tracking, profit and loss, 1099 summaries, time tracking and a payroll CSV of hours times rate. Notes can be tick-box checklists linked to a client, and jobs can be assigned to team members. Nexa has no text messaging, no QuickBooks or Google Calendar sync (calendar export is an .ics file), and no payroll taxes or pay stubs. Its automated emails send only while Nexa is open on one of your devices, and it comes with no hosted support desk or vendor-run onboarding.
Over three years HoneyBook at $36/month costs $1,296. Nexa costs $279 once, or 3 payments of $99, and adding optional Cloud Sync at $4.99/month brings three years to $458.64. Without sync, Nexa runs on one device. Stay on HoneyBook if you rely on SMS reminders, QuickBooks Online or vendor support. Consider Nexa if you mainly need invoicing, booking and expense records at a lower cost and can work from one device or pay for sync. Either way, handle insurance and permit tracking separately.
Our read for jugglers: The trade's core need is tracking liability insurance and permits per performer and gig, so a dedicated compliance and certificate-tracking tool is the right fit, with either product handling only the booking and billing around it.
Read on each linked page in October 2026. Check them again before you decide; vendors change plans often.
HoneyBook costs jugglers $432/year at today's list price. Nexa is $279 once for invoicing, scheduling, CRM, time tracking and accounting in one suite — so after 7.8 months it has cost less than HoneyBook, 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 HoneyBook 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 jugglers: Neither HoneyBook 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 $1,296 for HoneyBook over three years.
Client records, scheduling and invoicing 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. HoneyBook solves some of it. So does Nexa. The difference is what you are left holding in three years.
Today's list price is $36/month — $432 a year, from HoneyBook'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 $1,017 less.
If HoneyBook 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 | HoneyBook | Nexa |
|---|---|---|
| Invoicing | ✓ | ✓ |
| Scheduling | ✓ | ✓ |
| CRM | ✓ | ✓ |
| Time Tracking | — | ✓ |
| Full Accounting | — | ✓ (SIMPL) |
| Task Management | — | ✓ |
| Works offline | — | ✓ |
| Price | $36/mo | $279 once or 3 × $99 |
| 3-Year Total | $1,296 | $279 |
| You own it? | No — stop paying, lose access | Yes — forever |
✓ and ✗ for HoneyBook come from its own published feature list. — means the feature isn't in that list, which is not the same as HoneyBook lacking it: check with them. Three years is at today's price.
Straight from HoneyBook's own feature set. If one of these is the reason you pay them, that reason does not disappear because Nexa is cheaper.
HoneyBook is the better call if you need beautiful proposals and contracts specifically, or if your team is large enough that per-seat pricing still beats buying software outright.
HoneyBook describes itself as built for anyone with clients, aimed at small businesses that work with clients. Its categories are event services, marketing, design and creative, professional services, personal services, and home and real estate. (honeybook.com)
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 juggler: 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.)
HoneyBook plus whatever else you're paying for:
Email yourself this comparison?
The median Juggler earns $42,000/year. At $432/year, HoneyBook 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 jugglers. You own it like you own your Stage balls, clubs, and rings in graded weights.
An honest fit check — because the wrong tool is worse than no tool.
The honest fit: if you're a solo or small jugglers 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.
Client records, scheduling and invoicing 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.
The day starts tuning the set to the room. A morning kids' birthday needs the comedy version, lots of audience participation, a kid hauled up to 'help' and inevitably flub a club pass, big reactions, nothing over a few minutes. You pack the lighter clubs and the cigar boxes for that crowd. The gig itself is read-the-room work: you scan the ceiling height the second you walk in, because if it's a low rec-room ceiling your five-club cascade and the high ring pulls are out and you have to lean on contact juggling and ground-level material instead. You run the patter on a wireless mic so the parents can hear the jokes too, work in the drops as bits because recovery is the actual skill, and build to the unicycle finale if there's floor space. The afternoon flips to a corporate mixer that wants polish over slapstick, clean technical juggling, tighter patter, no kids on stage, so it's almost a different act with the same props. Between the two you're hauling the heavy prop case across town, and the schedule has to leave room to load in, warm up the hands, and not arrive cold. The day ends checking clubs for cracks, charging the PA, and re-sorting the case by which show is up next.
Real jugglers near you who run their business on Nexa — book directly, no platform fee. Are you a juggler? Post your business and get found in your area — $2.99 one-time. Or browse every juggler 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 juggler'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 juggler — 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 jugglers and small teams, yes. invoicing, scheduling, CRM, time tracking, task management, and full accounting — all for $279 once. HoneyBook may be better if you have a large team (10+) or need enterprise-specific features.
HoneyBook has features like Beautiful proposals and contracts and Client portal that some businesses rely on. For most solo jugglers, these aren't dealbreakers.
At $36/month, Nexa pays for itself in 7.8 months. After that: $432 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