What font sellers need from their software, from sources outside Wave and outside Nexa:
Font sellers need to track several license types per sale, not one product price. Webfont licenses are priced by monthly pageviews (tiers from 10,000 to 2,000,000). App licenses are tiered by downloads (10,000 to 2,500,000). ePub licenses are tiered by number of titles (1 to 24). Server, broadcasting, corporate, gaming and OEM licenses are quoted individually. Desktop licenses are perpetual, while the other types can be annual or perpetual. (fontfabric.com)
Licenses carry usage limits that customers can outgrow, so a seller needs to record each license's limits and term. One foundry says a license is valid only while its parameters are not exceeded. Annual licenses last one year from purchase. When a customer exceeds a limit, they contact the foundry to arrange a license update, so the seller has to handle renewals and upgrades. (fontfabric.com)
Copyright protection for fonts is limited, so the license agreement (EULA) is the seller's main protection and needs to be kept per customer. The U.S. Compendium of Copyright Office Practices states that typeface, typefont, lettering, calligraphy and typographic ornamentation are generally not registrable. The software code that generates a digital font may be registered, but that protection extends only to the source code, not the resulting typeface. (skrine.com)
Foundries selling online need to handle VAT by customer location and by whether the buyer is a business. A German foundry's prices include German VAT. EU business buyers who give a valid VAT ID at checkout are charged net, with no VAT added, under the reverse charge mechanism. Billing details must be correct, including the VAT ID for business-to-business transactions. (cape-arcona.com)
A Swiss foundry states that its prices exclude Swiss VAT and any other sales taxes. It charges no VAT or sales tax to customers outside Switzerland. Swiss customers are charged 8.1% VAT. EU companies must enter their VAT number when purchasing. So a seller needs to capture the buyer's country and VAT number on every order and keep its own VAT registration number on invoices. (lineto.com)
Font sellers need to record several license types per sale (webfont by pageviews, app by downloads, ePub by titles, desktop perpetual). They also need each license's limits and term for renewals and upgrades, the EULA kept per customer, and VAT handled by buyer country and VAT ID. Wave covers the money side well: invoices, bookkeeping, receipt capture, bank import on Pro, and late-payment reminders at 3, 7 and 14 days. Nothing in its feature list covers license records, usage limits, renewal dates, EULA storage or VAT ID and reverse-charge handling, so you would track those elsewhere.
Nexa covers invoices, estimates and quotes that convert to invoices, recurring invoices, a client pay portal, a CRM with notes and tags, and bookkeeping with sales tax tracking. It has no field for license limits or terms. It also has no stated support for VAT by buyer location or reverse charge, and card payments go only through your own Stripe account. If you use its automated emails for renewal reminders, they send only while Nexa is open on one of your devices. It is software you own and run yourself, with no hosted support desk.
Over three years Wave Pro is $684 ($19 a month, $228 a year). Nexa is $279 once, or $458.64 with optional Cloud Sync at $4.99 a month. Neither closes the gap that matters here. Keep whichever one you already use for invoicing and books. For license limits, renewals, per-customer EULAs and VAT by country and VAT ID, use a license-management or online-checkout tool with built-in tax handling. Switching between these two would not fix that.
Our read for font sellers: Neither tracks license limits, terms, EULAs or VAT by buyer location, so font sellers need a license-management and tax-aware checkout tool, with either of these only for the books.
Read on each linked page in October 2026. Check them again before you decide; vendors change plans often.
Bottom Line
Wave costs font sellers $228/year at today's list price. Nexa is $279 once for invoicing, scheduling, CRM, time tracking and accounting in one suite — so after 14.7 months it has cost less than Wave, 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.
Can it pay for itself?
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 Wave 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 font sellers: Neither Wave 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 $684 for Wave over three years.
Choose Nexa if:
You're done paying monthly forever
You're a solo operator or small team (1-5)
You need financial suite and task manager in one tool
You're tired of price increases
You want to own your tools like you own your equipment
Choose Wave if:
You have a large team (10+) needing enterprise features
You're deeply invested in Wave's specific workflow
You need a feature Nexa doesn't have yet
Sound Familiar?
The work is slow and exacting, mostly in Glyphs. The morning is drawing: refining the lowercase 'a' for the fifth time so its curve matches the 'e', then spacing the new glyphs because a beautiful letter is worthless if it doesn't sit right next to its neighbors. Kerning pairs get tuned by eye, the AV and the To and the dozens of awkward combinations, then proofed in a test document at body size and display size. OpenType features are the afternoon's headache: programming the ligatures and stylistic alternates so the swash caps trigger correctly, then testing them in Illustrator and InDesign to confirm they actually fire. The inbox is licensing and support: a buyer asks whether their desktop license covers putting the font on their website, another can't get the ligatures to show in Canva, a business wants an extended license for product packaging and needs a custom quote. Each license tier has to be tracked, because someone who bought a single-user desktop license is now clearly using the font across a ten-person studio. A pirated copy of last year's release shows up on a free-fonts site, prompting a takedown. The day ends specing the next weight in the family and reconciling license sales across three marketplaces, each with different fee structures, knowing the real exposure is the commercial use happening with no license at all.
Selling fonts means selling licenses, not files, and tracking who bought desktop versus web versus extended commercial rights, and chasing those who exceed their tier, is a legal mess with no clean ledger
A single typeface is months of drawing, spacing, and kerning every glyph plus OpenType features, so the upfront labor is enormous against a low per-license price
Buyers email asking why a ligature isn't showing, how to install the font, or whether their use is covered, so a downloadable product still carries constant licensing and tech support
Fonts are pirated and shared on free-download sites the moment they sell, and tracking unauthorized commercial use, especially by businesses on logos and products, is nearly impossible alone
The books and job tracking 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. Wave solves some of it. So does Nexa. The difference is what you are left holding in three years.
What Wave Actually Costs Font Sellers
Today's list price is $19/month — $228 a year, from Wave's own pricing page. Every figure below is that price, multiplied. Nothing is projected.
Three years at today's price
Year 1$228
Year 2$228
Year 3$228
Three years of Wave$684
Nexa: $279 once (or 3 × $99). Over the same three years, that is $405 less.
If Wave 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-by-Feature
Feature
Wave
Nexa
Invoicing
✓
✓
Scheduling
✗
✓
CRM
✗
✓
Time Tracking
✗
✓
Full Accounting
✓
✓ (SIMPL)
Task Management
✗
✓
Works offline
✗
✓
Price
$19/mo
$279 once or 3 × $99
3-Year Total
$684
$279
You own it?
No — stop paying, lose access
Yes — forever
✓ and ✗ for Wave come from its own published feature list. — means the feature isn't in that list, which is not the same as Wave lacking it: check with them. Three years is at today's price.
What "$279 Once" Does And Doesn't Buy
It buys the software, not a service contract. You install Nexa and it runs on your machine. There is no seat count, and nothing stops working if you stop paying, because there is nothing to stop paying.
Wave's monthly fee is not only rent. It pays for their hosting, their support desk, and their engineers shipping changes every week. If those matter to how you work, that is a real thing you would be giving up.
Cross-device sync is the one optional extra — $4.99/month if you want your data mirrored between machines. Skip it and Nexa still works; you just sync manually.
The honest risk of buying once: you are betting on us still being here to improve it. The honest risk of renting: the price is theirs to raise, and the graveyard section below is a record of tools that did exactly that.
What Wave Does Better
Straight from Wave's own feature set. If one of these is the reason you pay them, that reason does not disappear because Nexa is cheaper.
Free plan covering unlimited invoices and bookkeeping
Bank transaction import on Pro
Receipt capture
Late payment reminders
Simple enough to run without an accountant
A free plan to start on (with limits), so you can use Wave before paying anything.
Wave is the better call if you need free plan covering unlimited invoices and bookkeeping specifically, or if your team is large enough that per-seat pricing still beats buying software outright.
What Wave Is Built For
Wave says it is built for small business owners and solopreneurs at every stage, not accountants. Its page names freelancers, contractors and consultants. (waveapps.com)
The Starter plan costs $0 and includes unlimited estimates, invoices, bills and bookkeeping records. (waveapps.com)
Pro costs $19 USD a month or $190 USD a year. It adds automatic bank transaction import (for banks Plaid supports), automatic merging and categorizing of bank transactions, and automated late-payment reminders at 3, 7 and 14 days after the due date. (waveapps.com)
Pro lets you put your logo and brand colors on invoices, remove Wave branding from footers, and attach files to invoices and estimates. It also adds user roles (admin, editor, viewer), and the payroll manager and Block Advisors tax pro roles are free. (waveapps.com)
Online card payments on Starter cost 2.9% + $0.60 (Amex 3.4% + $0.60). On Pro the first 10 transactions each month are 2.9% + $0, then 2.9% + $0.60. (waveapps.com)
Wave Advisors starts at $149 a month and includes a dedicated bookkeeper and monthly financial statements. Payroll is an add-on starting at $25 a month in one region and $40 in the other; the page does not say which price applies where. (waveapps.com)
Wave lists a mobile app for invoices, expenses and receipts, and 256-bit SSL encryption with PCI-DSS Level 1 certification. Live chat and email support runs Monday to Friday, 9 AM to 4:45 PM Eastern, and is tied to optional add-ons. (waveapps.com)
What people outside Wave and outside Nexa say:
NerdWallet lists a free plan and straightforward invoicing as pros. Its cons are no built-in third-party integrations, no advanced features such as mileage, time tracking or inventory, no live support unless you pay, and no audit trails. (nerdwallet.com)
NerdWallet says "An overwhelming number of Wave reviewers criticize its customer support." It adds that the paid plan "doesn't address Wave users' biggest complaint: customer service." (nerdwallet.com)
Tech.co praises the free tier, affordable add-ons and the way Wave "does the basics well." It concludes "Wave is definitely worth it" for side businesses that don't need specialist accounting features. (tech.co)
Tech.co criticizes Wave for lacking advanced features such as budgeting, cash flow projections, stock handling and project accounting, and for struggling to scale with growing businesses. It also says phone and live chat support come at a premium. (tech.co)
Read on each linked page in October 2026. Check them again before you decide; vendors change plans often.
Where business tools fit — for a font seller
Software doesn't do the actual work — it automates the business around it. And that part is the same for every font seller: 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.
1
Find the work
Win the job
↓
A lead, a call, a referral — and a quote or estimate that turns it into a booked job.
CRM / contacts
Estimates & proposals
Booking / scheduling
then ↓
2
Manage the work
Do the job
↓
The part you actually get paid for — with the time, materials, add-ons, and tasks tracked as you go, not guessed at later.
Job / project tracking
Time tracking
Expenses, materials & add-ons
then ↓
3
Bill for it
Send the bill
↓
The work becomes the invoice — the hours, the add-ons, the materials, the deposit credited — totaled and sent, instead of re-typed at 9pm.
Invoicing
Deposits & credits
then ↓
4
Get paid
Collect payment
↓
Paid by card or link, the deposit credited, and what's overdue chased — without you doing it by hand.
Card / online payments
Automatic reminders
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.)
Calculate Your Full Stack
Wave plus whatever else you're paying for:
Email yourself this comparison?
Switching from Wave
1
Export your data — Go to Settings → Data Export. Download customers, invoices, transactions, and accounts.
2
Set up Nexa — 15-minute setup. Import your client list and bank transactions from CSV.
3
Parallel run — Run both for 1-2 weeks. Re-create recurring invoices in Nexa and check your bank imports.
4
Cancel Wave — Cancel paid features. Your free account data stays accessible for records.
✓ 30-day money-back guarantee. Zero risk.
What This Means for Font Sellers
The median Font Seller earns $32,000/year. At $228/year, Wave 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 font sellers. You own it like you own your Glyphs or FontLab for drawing and spacing the typeface.
Is Nexa actually right for a font seller?
An honest fit check — because the wrong tool is worse than no tool.
Right for you if
You run solo or a small team — like the 40,000 font sellers in the US who do, and you wear every hat.
You're tired of paying every month for a monthly subscription stack and a pile of apps that don't talk to each other.
You want invoicing, scheduling, and client tracking in one place — not scattered across five apps.
You'd rather own your software once, the way you own your Glyphs or FontLab for drawing and spacing the typeface.
Look elsewhere if
You have a large team that needs enterprise seats, granular roles, and dedicated admin staff — Nexa is built for solo and small operators (1–5), and a bigger platform will serve you better.
You need full payroll for a large team or deep, SKU-level inventory — that's not what Nexa is for.
You're genuinely happy paying monthly and don't mind stitching tools together. No tool fixes a workflow you already like.
The honest fit: if you're a solo or small font sellers 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.
The books and job tracking 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.
What font sellers actually deal with
Selling fonts means selling licenses, not files, and tracking who bought desktop versus web versus extended commercial rights, and chasing those who exceed their tier, is a legal mess with no clean ledger
A single typeface is months of drawing, spacing, and kerning every glyph plus OpenType features, so the upfront labor is enormous against a low per-license price
Buyers email asking why a ligature isn't showing, how to install the font, or whether their use is covered, so a downloadable product still carries constant licensing and tech support
Fonts are pirated and shared on free-download sites the moment they sell, and tracking unauthorized commercial use, especially by businesses on logos and products, is nearly impossible alone
A day in the life of a font seller
The work is slow and exacting, mostly in Glyphs. The morning is drawing: refining the lowercase 'a' for the fifth time so its curve matches the 'e', then spacing the new glyphs because a beautiful letter is worthless if it doesn't sit right next to its neighbors. Kerning pairs get tuned by eye, the AV and the To and the dozens of awkward combinations, then proofed in a test document at body size and display size. OpenType features are the afternoon's headache: programming the ligatures and stylistic alternates so the swash caps trigger correctly, then testing them in Illustrator and InDesign to confirm they actually fire. The inbox is licensing and support: a buyer asks whether their desktop license covers putting the font on their website, another can't get the ligatures to show in Canva, a business wants an extended license for product packaging and needs a custom quote. Each license tier has to be tracked, because someone who bought a single-user desktop license is now clearly using the font across a ten-person studio. A pirated copy of last year's release shows up on a free-fonts site, prompting a takedown. The day ends specing the next weight in the family and reconciling license sales across three marketplaces, each with different fee structures, knowing the real exposure is the commercial use happening with no license at all.
The tools a working font seller actually owns
Glyphs or FontLab for drawing and spacing the typeface
a drawing tablet for sketching letterforms and refining curves
kerning and spacing tools plus OpenType feature programming for ligatures and alternates
font-testing software to proof the typeface at every size and weight
a Creative Market, MyFonts, or Etsy storefront with tiered license listings
an EULA template defining desktop, web, and commercial usage rights
Local font sellers on Nexa
Real font sellers near you who run their business on Nexa — book directly, no platform fee.
Are you a font seller? Post your business and get found in your area — $2.99 one-time.
Or browse every font seller on Nexa →
The kit a working font seller owns
The tools of the trade — each a one-time buy that earns its keep for years.
Glyphs or FontLab for drawing and spacing the typeface
a drawing tablet for sketching letterforms and refining curves
kerning and spacing tools plus OpenType feature programming for ligatures and alternates
font-testing software to proof the typeface at every size and weight
a Creative Market, MyFonts, or Etsy storefront with tiered license listings
an EULA template defining desktop, web, and commercial usage rights
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.
How To Read This Page
We make Nexa. It is one of the two options compared here, so read this with that in mind. We have tried to make Wave's case the way we would want ours made — their strengths above are their own published feature list, not our summary of it.
The prices are Wave's published list prices, checked on the date shown in the sources below. Plans change; check theirs before you decide.
No customer quotes appear on this page because we do not have any from font sellers we can verify. For user testimony, read the independent reviews — Wave on G2 and on Capterra — where the reviewers are not selling you anything.
Check the price yourself:Wave's own pricing page is the source for every figure above, read on the date shown in the sources section below.
We are not neutral about subscriptions, and that is the argument, not a hidden assumption: software you pay for once is cheaper over three years than software you rent, unless you need something only the rented one does.
How we put this guide together
We build a font seller'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 font seller — 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.
Where the numbers come from
Vendor pricingQuickBooks $456/yr, Wave $228/yr, FreshBooks $516/yr, Square — taken from each company's published plans, last verified September 2026. Pricing moves; each name above links straight to that vendor’s own pricing page so you can confirm it before you decide.
Income contextThe $32,000 median we cite for the typical font seller is occupational median annual pay from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (Occupational Employment & Wage Statistics), compiled April 2026. We use it only to show software spend as a share of real income — your own numbers will differ.
Three-year mathMulti-year totals are today's list price multiplied by the number of years. No price rise is projected, so the figure can be checked against the vendor's own pricing page; if they raise it, the real cost is higher.
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.
FAQ
Is Nexa really a Wave replacement?
For solo font sellers and small teams, yes. invoicing, scheduling, CRM, time tracking, task management, and full accounting — all for $279 once. Wave may be better if you have a large team (10+) or need enterprise-specific features.
What does Wave do that Nexa doesn't?
Wave has features like Free plan covering unlimited invoices and bookkeeping and Bank transaction import on Pro that some businesses rely on. For most solo font sellers, these aren't dealbreakers.
How fast does Nexa pay for itself?
At $19/month, Nexa pays for itself in 14.7 months. After that: $228 saved every year.
Can I pay in installments?
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.