What river guides need from their software, from sources outside HoneyBook and outside Nexa:
HoneyBook covers the client-facing paperwork well. Its contracts and client portal could carry a signed risk-acknowledgement form (not a liability waiver) on each booking, and it handles proposals, invoices and payments. Deposits fit here too. What its feature list does not include is the permit side of the trade. That means counting service days and gross revenue per permit area against the Forest Service fee brackets. It also means tracking insurance certificate expiry and renewal, or First Aid/CPR and state registration dates. You would have to track those somewhere else.
Nexa covers a lot of the day-to-day running of a guiding business. It has a public booking page with intake forms, estimates and invoices that clients sign and pay through your own Stripe account, and a CRM. It also has jobs with costing and profit per job, assigning jobs to team members, time tracking, and bookkeeping with expenses and profit and loss. Nothing in its listed features is built around permit service days, certificate expiry or staff certification dates. It also has no QuickBooks sync, no Google Calendar sync (calendar export is an .ics file), no text messages and no hosted support desk. Its automated emails send only while Nexa is open on one of your devices.
Over three years HoneyBook at $36 a month costs $1,296 ($432 a year). Nexa is $279 once, or $458.64 with the optional $4.99 monthly Cloud Sync (the $279 plus 36 months of sync). That is the only price gap. Neither tool tracks the permit and certification deadlines that carry the real risk for a guide. If you already use HoneyBook for client paperwork, keep it and add a separate permit and compliance tracker. If you are not yet paying for a client tool, Nexa is the cheaper way to run bookings, invoices and job costs, with the same compliance gap.
Our read for river guides: Neither covers permit service-day, insurance-certificate and staff-certification tracking, so pair whichever client tool you use with a dedicated outfitter permit and compliance tracker.
Read on each linked page in October 2026. Check them again before you decide; vendors change plans often.
HoneyBook costs river guides $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 river guides: 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.
Scheduling, client records 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 actual work — it automates the business around it. And that part is the same for every river guide: 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 actual work. Tap a step to see what gets automated.
An inquiry becomes a proposal becomes a signed engagement — the terms and the retainer set.
The work you're paid for — with the hours, tasks, and expenses tracked against the engagement instead of reconstructed at month-end.
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 actual 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 River Guide 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 river guides. You own it like you own your A whitewater raft or dory with spare oars and a paddle set.
An honest fit check — because the wrong tool is worse than no tool.
The honest fit: if you're a solo or small river guides 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.
Scheduling, client records 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.
I check the flow gauge before I check my coffee, because the river writes the day. Too low and the rapids turn to bony rock gardens, too high and a run gets genuinely dangerous, and a dam release upstream can change everything by morning. When the numbers are right, I rig the raft at the put-in, lash the dry bags, and size every client into a PFD, a helmet, and a wetsuit, because cold-water shock is real and a loose life jacket is useless. The safety talk comes before we launch, how to high-side if we hit a hole, what to do if you swim, where to put your feet, because the river doesn't care that they paid for fun. Then we are on the water, reading the current, calling strokes, threading the line through the big drop while keeping the boat off the rocks that would wrap us. I run the shuttle logistics in my head the whole time, the vehicle waiting at take-out miles downstream. On a multi-day expedition the planning multiplies, deposits collected months ahead, a signed waiver and correct gear sizing for every soul in the party. Summer is a flood of bookings, and I am fitting them all around permit launch dates and whatever the flows decide to do.
Real river guides near you who run their business on Nexa — book directly, no platform fee. Are you a river guide? Post your business and get found in your area — $2.99 one-time. Or browse every river guide 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 river guide'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 river guide — 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 river guides 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 river guides, 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