How much does Dubsado cost in 2026?

Dubsado repriced on 1 December 2025. Starter is now $35 a month billed monthly, or $28 annually, up from $20. Premier is $55 a month, up from $40. Existing subscribers were grandfathered at the old rates, so anyone evaluating Dubsado today pays more than most comparison articles report.

Is Dubsado still worth the learning curve?

If you enjoy building systems and will genuinely use deep automation, Dubsado remains the most capable workflow builder in this category. The value case weakened when Starter moved to $35, because the old argument was that you traded setup time for a much lower price, and that price gap has largely closed.

What is the simplest Dubsado alternative?

Bonsai and Stria both work without building workflows. Bonsai is lighter and strongest on contracts and taxes, at $25 a user billed monthly for the cheapest plan that includes invoicing. Stria is opinionated about the delivery workflow — locked scope, approvals and change orders — at $19 a month for two seats, with a free tier.

Which alternative has built-in change orders?

Stria generates priced change orders from an out-of-scope verdict and folds a signed one back into a new locked scope baseline. We describe what each competitor's own materials document rather than asserting absences we cannot verify from outside their products, so check their sites if change orders are your deciding factor.

Dubsado Alternatives in 2026: Simpler Options

Dubsado is the platform people love eventually. Its automation builder can run most of a business — after you have spent weeks building workflows, mapping forms and watching setup videos. If you opened it, saw a blank canvas, and thought "I just want to send a proposal," this page is for you.

The number you have in your head is probably wrong. Dubsado repriced on 1 December 2025: Starter went from $20 to $35 a month, Premier from $40 to $55. Existing subscribers were grandfathered, which is why the old figure persists in every round-up written by someone still paying it.

That change matters more than it looks. The classic case for Dubsado was "harder to learn, but half the price." At $35 monthly it sits a dollar under HoneyBook Starter's $36. You are no longer buying a discount in exchange for setup time — you are buying capability at roughly market rate, which is a different decision.

Method: Dubsado's and Bonsai's ladders were corroborated across independent 2026 round-ups and each vendor's published figures on 23 August 2026; HoneyBook's was verified on 9 August 2026. Verify current pricing on each vendor's site — dubsado.com/pricing for Dubsado. Tools we could not verify are named without prices. We build Stria.

Verified pricing, monthly against monthly

Platform	Entry paid plan	Monthly	Annually	Seats	Standing free tier
Stria	Solo	$19	Ten months for twelve	2 included	Yes — one job end to end
Bonsai	Essentials	$25/user	$19/user	1, per user	No
Dubsado	Starter	$35	$28	Not stated	Trial only, 3 clients
HoneyBook	Starter	$36	$29	1	No

Bonsai's cheaper Basic tier at $15 a user is excluded from that row deliberately: it does not include invoicing, proposals or contracts, so it is not a like-for-like purchase. Dubsado Starter also excludes automated workflows, scheduling and public proposals — the features Dubsado is famous for start at Premier, $55.

The same figures read against what each platform is actually for, rather than only against Dubsado, are in HoneyBook vs Dubsado vs Bonsai vs Stria.

Where Dubsado is the better choice

Worth saying before the alternatives, because it is true and it disqualifies a lot of readers from switching.

Dubsado's workflow engine and form builder go further than anything else here. Conditional logic, canned emails triggered by project state, custom-built schedulers, forms that branch — if you want to construct a bespoke machine, Dubsado is the better workshop and none of the tools below will satisfy you. Its template community is large and generous. And if you already have a well-built Dubsado setup, migrating away is usually a mistake: you would be paying the setup cost twice to move to something with less depth.

Switch if the setup cost is the problem. Do not switch because a comparison article said something was cheaper.

Stria — opinionated instead of configurable

Where Dubsado hands you a canvas, Stria makes the decision for you: the delivery workflow runs locked scope → client review → approval → change order → invoice, and it works without configuration because there is nothing to configure.

Change orders are native rather than something you build. Forward a client's email and Stria checks the request against your locked scope baseline, returning a verdict that quotes the clause it relied on — the excerpt is re-sliced from your stored document on the server, so the model returns a pointer and cannot fabricate the quotation. An out-of-scope verdict is priced against your rate card and becomes a signable change order; signing it folds the new lines into a fresh locked baseline version. In Dubsado you could approximate parts of that with workflows and forms, and you would be maintaining it.

Approvals produce evidence. Each sign-off stores the verified email a six-digit code was sent to and consumed from, the server-observed IP, the timestamp, the exact consent sentence, and a SHA-256 fingerprint of the approved version, then becomes permanently unwritable — the update and delete triggers refuse for everyone, the table owner included. Anyone holding the certificate can verify it on a public page with no account. It is a simple electronic signature under eIDAS; we claim nothing above that.

Money without a middleman. Charges run on your own connected Stripe account with no platform fee and no card fields on Stria. Deposit invoices hold deliverable files until they clear, enforced at the point the download link is minted. Overdue invoices get three escalating reminders under your branding, with late fees only after a final notice.

On margin: Stria tracks each project's quoted amount against projected and actual cost and derives an effective hourly rate. All of it stays blank until you log time and expenses, deliberately, because a fabricated rate is worse than an absent one. Discount this if you will not track hours.

Where Dubsado still beats Stria: automation depth, form flexibility, and template community — none of which Stria attempts.

Bonsai — the lightest credible option

Bonsai is the anti-Dubsado: almost nothing to set up, strong contract library, genuinely good freelance tax tooling. Two things to price in. It bills per user on every tier, so collaborators compound the cost, and the cheapest plan that can send an invoice is Essentials at $25 a user monthly — Basic at $15 cannot. Zoom acquired Bonsai in December 2025 and the standalone product continues; the roadmap is an open question. More in our Bonsai alternatives guide.

HoneyBook — guided, polished, North America only

HoneyBook Starter is $36 monthly for one seat. It is more guided than Dubsado and more complete than Bonsai, with the best lead-capture forms and template library in the group. Constraints: it works from a country list — the US, Canada, the UK and Australia as at 13 September 2026 — and its ~89% Starter rise landed in February 2025 rather than 2026. See our HoneyBook alternatives comparison.

Named without prices

Plutio, Copilot, 17hats and Assembly are all plausible shortlist entries. Plutio is modular rather than workflow-driven, which is a middle path between Dubsado and Bonsai. 17hats specifically targets the blank-canvas problem with step-by-step setup wizards. Copilot leads on client-portal polish, Assembly on client visibility. We have not verified their pricing and so quote none of it.

How to choose

List what you actually used in Dubsado. If the honest answer is proposals, contracts and invoices, you were renting a workshop to use three hand tools — pick something opinionated.
Decide your tolerance for configuration. None: Stria or Bonsai. Some: Plutio or HoneyBook. You secretly enjoyed it: stay, and upgrade to Premier.
Check which gaps you are actually feeling. If scope creep and approval disputes are the recurring damage, the shortlist is short.

Send the next proposal today

You should not need a setup weekend before your tool is useful. Stria's free plan runs one real job end to end — lock a scope, share work, take an approval, invoice — before you pay anything: start a 14-day trial at getstria.com. Or paste a live client request into the free scope check with no account at all.