What beat makers need from their software, from sources outside QuickBooks and outside Nexa:
QuickBooks covers the money side of beat selling well. The $38/month plan comes with bank feed reconciliation, comprehensive reporting and 800+ integrations, and accountants know it. That helps with Schedule C and Schedule SE, because income per sale and expenses are easy to report. What it does not do is track the licensing side of the trade. Nothing in its feature list tracks each lease's term, download cap and expiry per buyer, keeps a per-beat record of earlier non-exclusive leases before an exclusive sale, or stores publishing, mechanical and credit terms. It also doesn't record WAV or stem delivery. Registering works with The MLC and tracking what it owes you are outside it too.
Nexa covers some of the same ground. It has invoices, estimates and proposals that convert to invoices, and a client pay portal where buyers pay by card through your own Stripe account and sign estimates. It also has a CRM with notes and tags, expenses, bank reconciliation, profit and loss, and 1099 summaries. Those are enough to log each sale and keep your books. But Nexa has no feature for lease expiry or usage caps, no per-beat license history, and no field for publishing splits or MLC registrations. A producer would be putting those terms into general notes. Nexa also has no sync or import with QuickBooks, so an existing QuickBooks history can't move over. Without the optional Cloud Sync it runs on one device. It is software you own and run yourself, with no hosted support desk.
Over three years QuickBooks at $38/month costs $1,368. Nexa costs $279 once, or $458.64 if you add Cloud Sync at $4.99/month. Nexa is cheaper, but neither tool does the part of this trade that is hardest to get right: per-beat, per-buyer license terms. If your accountant works in QuickBooks, stay there for the books. If you only need invoicing and basic bookkeeping and want to pay less, Nexa can do that. Either way, keep the licenses in a separate music-licensing or catalog and rights-tracking tool.
Our read for beat makers: Neither tool tracks lease terms, expiry, per-beat license history or publishing, so use a music-licensing and rights-tracking tool for that and keep your books in whichever of the two you already prefer.
Read on each linked page in October 2026. Check them again before you decide; vendors change plans often.
QuickBooks costs beat makers $456/year at today's list price. Nexa is $279 once for invoicing, scheduling, CRM, time tracking and accounting in one suite — so after 7.3 months it has cost less than QuickBooks, 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 QuickBooks 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 beat makers: Neither QuickBooks 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 $1,368 for QuickBooks over three years.
The books, 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 into something you buy once. 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. QuickBooks solves some of it. So does Nexa. The difference is what you are left holding in three years.
Today's list price is $38/month — $456 a year, from QuickBooks'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 $1,089 less.
If QuickBooks 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.
Today's sticker price only tells you what a subscription costs today. These are dated changes, each linked to the announcement or report it comes from. Tap one for the numbers.
For renewals on or after February 1, 2026, Pro Plus and Mac Plus went from $999 to $1,149 a year for one user, and each extra seat from $200 to $230.
Source: SWK Technologies, Insightful Accountant (Dec 2, 2025)
From July 1, 2025: Simple Start $35 to $38, Essentials $65 to $75, Plus $99 to $115, Advanced $235 to $275 a month.
Source: Woodard Report (May 27, 2025)
After September 30, 2024, new US customers can no longer buy these Desktop editions. Existing subscribers can keep renewing.
Source: Intuit
Only changes we can link to a vendor announcement or a named publication are listed. Plans, add-ons and discounts vary, so check the vendor's current pricing page before you decide.
| Feature | QuickBooks | Nexa |
|---|---|---|
| Invoicing | ✓ | ✓ |
| Scheduling | ✗ | ✓ |
| CRM | ✗ | ✓ |
| Time Tracking | — | ✓ |
| Full Accounting | ✓ | ✓ (SIMPL) |
| Task Management | ✗ | ✓ |
| Works offline | — | ✓ |
| Price | $38/mo | $279 once or 3 × $99 |
| 3-Year Total | $1,368 | $279 |
| You own it? | No — stop paying, lose access | Yes — forever |
✓ and ✗ for QuickBooks come from its own published feature list. — means the feature isn't in that list, which is not the same as QuickBooks lacking it: check with them. Three years is at today's price.
Straight from QuickBooks's own feature set. If one of these is the reason you pay them, that reason does not disappear because Nexa is cheaper.
QuickBooks is the better call if you need industry standard - accountants know it specifically, or if your team is large enough that per-seat pricing still beats buying software outright.
QuickBooks Online is aimed at freelancers and new businesses, small and mid-size businesses, product-based businesses, and nonprofits. Larger or more complex operations are pointed to Desktop Enterprise (up to 40 users) or Intuit Enterprise Suite (multi-entity). (quickbooks.intuit.com)
What people outside QuickBooks 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 beat maker: 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.)
QuickBooks plus whatever else you're paying for:
Email yourself this comparison?
The median beat maker earns $22,000/year. At $456/year, QuickBooks 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 beat makers. You own it like you own your DAW (FL Studio, Ableton, Logic).
An honest fit check — because the wrong tool is worse than no tool.
The honest fit: if you're a solo or small beat makers 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 →Active community — tool picks, pricing, and day-to-day questions.
Open on Reddit →The books, 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 into something you buy once. The sections below price both routes honestly.
I start by 10 with coffee and the laptop, headphones on, and cook up two or three ideas: chop a sample, find a loop in a pack, lay out 808 slides and hi-hat rolls at 140 BPM, and build a trap drum pattern with the kick sitting under the bass. Most ideas die by lunch; one gets a full arrangement with intro, hook, verse and a drop. In the afternoon I work on the custom beat for a local rapper, who paid half upfront. He sent a voice memo of the flow he wants, so I rework the bridge, mix the 808 so it doesn't mud up his vocal, and bounce stems out as separate WAVs for drums, bass, melody and FX. Then I tag the new beat with a producer tag, export an untagged WAV and an MP3, and upload it to BeatStars and Airbit with the key, BPM, mood tags and cover art. Someone buys a lease, so I check the license tier (MP3 lease, WAV lease, or unlimited) and send the right files with a stream-cap agreement. Someone else asks if a beat is still available exclusive, which means I have to check nobody leased it since, or tell him those leases stay valid. In the evening I post a snippet, answer DMs haggling over the price, renew a plugin subscription that I forgot about, and try to work out which of my two hundred beats actually earn, comparing lease sales on each marketplace with my direct sales.
Real beat makers near you who run their business on Nexa — book directly, no platform fee. Are you a beat maker? Post your business and get found in your area — $2.99 one-time. Or browse every beat maker 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 beat maker'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 beat maker — 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 beat makers and small teams, yes. invoicing, scheduling, CRM, time tracking, task management, and full accounting — all for $279 once. QuickBooks may be better if you have a large team (10+) or need enterprise-specific features.
QuickBooks has features like Industry standard - accountants know it and 800+ app integrations that some businesses rely on. For most solo beat makers, these aren't dealbreakers.
At $38/month, Nexa pays for itself in 7.3 months. After that: $456 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