Which freelance platform is cheapest in 2026?

Compared monthly against monthly, Stria Solo is the lowest paid entry at $19 including two seats, and it is the only one of the four with a standing free tier. Bonsai Essentials is $25 a user, Dubsado Starter is $35 and HoneyBook Starter is $36. Bonsai Basic is $15 but cannot send an invoice.

Is HoneyBook better than Dubsado?

They solve different problems and they are now priced almost identically — $36 against $35 billed monthly. HoneyBook is stronger for lead capture, templates and getting started quickly. Dubsado is stronger for automation depth and customisation. HoneyBook lists four supported countries as at 13 September 2026 — the US, Canada, the UK and Australia — where Dubsado is not limited to a country list.

Did Dubsado raise its prices?

Yes, on 1 December 2025. Starter went from $20 to $35 a month and Premier from $40 to $55. Existing subscribers were grandfathered at the old rates, which is why the older figures still circulate in comparison articles written by people who are still paying them.

Can I use two of these platforms together?

Yes, and it is a reasonable answer rather than a compromise. A common pairing is HoneyBook for lead capture and nurture with Stria for delivery, approvals and margin, because those are the two halves neither product fully covers alone.

HoneyBook vs Dubsado vs Bonsai vs Stria (2026)

Four platforms dominate the "run my freelance business in one place" conversation, and they disagree about which part of the business is hardest. HoneyBook bets on winning work. Dubsado bets on configurability. Bonsai bets on staying out of the way. Stria bets on what happens after the client says yes.

We build Stria, and this page is written so we would be comfortable if the other three read it. Every price traces to a dated record: HoneyBook's was verified on 9 August 2026 against honeybook.com/pricing; Dubsado's and Bonsai's were corroborated across independent 2026 round-ups and each vendor's published figures on 23 August 2026. HoneyBook's country availability was re-verified on 13 September 2026 against its own terms of service and May 2026 launch announcement; this page previously called it US and Canada only, which stopped being true on 28 May 2026. Verify current pricing and supported countries on each vendor's own site before deciding.

Two figures most comparisons get wrong

If you have read other articles on this, you are probably carrying two stale numbers.

Dubsado is not $20 a month. It repriced on 1 December 2025: Starter $20 → $35, Premier $40 → $55, with existing subscribers grandfathered. Every "Dubsado is half the price of HoneyBook" line still in circulation was written by someone on the old rate. At $35 it is a dollar under HoneyBook Starter.

HoneyBook's big increase was February 2025, not 2026. The ~89% Starter rise is real and eighteen months old. Its churn has already happened.

Both corrections cut against the easy narrative, and both change the actual decision.

The price table

	HoneyBook	Dubsado	Bonsai	Stria
Entry paid plan	Starter	Starter	Essentials	Solo
Billed monthly	$36	$35	$25/user	$19
Billed annually	$29/mo	$28/mo	$19/user	Ten months for twelve
Seats included	1	Not stated	1, per user	2
Standing free tier	No	Trial only, 3 clients	No	Yes — one job end to end
Next tier up	$59 Essentials	$55 Premier	$39/user Premium	$39 Studio, 5 seats
Availability	US, Canada, UK, Australia	International	International	International, via Stripe

Three things the table cannot carry:

Bonsai Basic is $15 a user and cannot send an invoice. Invoicing, proposals and contracts start at Essentials, which is why Essentials is the row above. Per-user pricing also means a single collaborator doubles it.
Dubsado Starter excludes automated workflows, scheduling and public proposals. The capability Dubsado is known for is Premier at $55.
"Not stated" means the vendor's own page does not publish a seat inclusion and secondary sources contradict each other. We can prove what a page says; we cannot prove what a product includes.

HoneyBook — win more work

Strengths. The best lead-capture forms, enquiry pipeline and nurture automation in this group, plus the deepest template library and the largest community. If your revenue problem is that not enough people ask you for quotes, this is the product that fixes it and the other three do not.

Weaknesses. The most expensive entry here. It works from a country list rather than everywhere — the US, Canada, the UK and Australia as at 13 September 2026 — so it is worth checking before you shortlist it. And its model treats a signed contract as a point-in-time event, so ongoing scope decisions live in email.

Best for established North American freelancers with real enquiry volume who will use a CRM properly.

Dubsado — build your own machine

Strengths. Workflow and form builders that go further than anything else in the category, a large template community, and flat pricing without per-seat maths.

Weaknesses. The learning curve is the product, not a rough edge — weeks, not an afternoon. And the price rise removed the discount that used to justify it, so you are now paying market rate for capability rather than saving money in exchange for effort.

Best for people who enjoy configuration and will genuinely use deep automation.

Bonsai — stay out of the way

Strengths. The fastest setup of the four, the most mature freelance contract library, and the best tax tooling here. If contracts and taxes are the actual job, it does them better than we do.

Weaknesses. Per-user pricing on every tier, a cheapest plan that cannot invoice, and Zoom's December 2025 acquisition leaving the roadmap an open question. Users commonly report hitting a ceiling around approvals and project budgeting as they grow.

Best for solo freelancers who want contracts and invoices handled with no fuss and will stay solo.

Stria — deliver profitably

Ours. Stria starts at the accepted proposal and is built around two places freelance money leaks: scope nobody priced, and margin nobody could see in time.

Scope becomes a record. You lock a scope baseline — immutable and versioned. Forward a client email and Stria returns a verdict against it that quotes the clause it relied on, with the excerpt re-sliced from your stored document on the server so the model points at text rather than generating it. Out-of-scope requests are priced against your rate card into a signable change order, which folds into a new locked baseline version once signed.

Approvals leave third-party-checkable evidence. Each sign-off records the verified email a one-time code was sent to and consumed from, the server-observed IP, the timestamp, the exact consent wording and a SHA-256 fingerprint of the approved version, then closes permanently — the update and delete triggers refuse for everyone, table owner included. The certificate carries a link to a public page where anyone can confirm it without an account and without seeing the signer's email or IP. This is a simple electronic signature under eIDAS and we do not claim more.

Money is yours. Charges run on your own connected Stripe account with no platform fee and no card fields on Stria. Deposit invoices withhold files until they clear, enforced where the download link is minted and failing closed on error. Overdue invoices get three escalating reminders under your branding, with late fees only after a final notice.

Margin, stated precisely. Stria records each project's quoted amount and tracks projected and actual cost against it, producing margin percentages and an effective hourly rate — the number that reveals a "good" $6,000 job was $22 an hour. These stay blank until you log time and expenses. The product refuses to print a rate it cannot substantiate, which is correct and does mean the feature is worthless to someone who will not track hours.

Weaknesses, honestly. The newest product of the four, with the smallest template library and integration ecosystem. No lead capture and no CRM pipeline at all — if the top of your funnel is the problem, Stria will not touch it. And a free tier that is genuinely capped: three clients, six deliverables a month, twenty AI actions a month.

Where each competitor is the better choice

Condensed, because it is the section that decides most of these:

HoneyBook is better if you need to win more work. Lead capture, templates, nurture. Not close.
Dubsado is better if you want a bespoke automated machine and will build it.
Bonsai is better if you want contracts and taxes handled and nothing else, and you work alone.
Stria is better if the damage happens after the yes.

If you have already settled on which one you are leaving, the per-vendor round-ups go deeper on the switch itself: HoneyBook alternatives, Dubsado alternatives and Bonsai alternatives.

Decide in four questions

Is finding clients the bottleneck? → HoneyBook.
Do you enjoy building systems? → Dubsado, on Premier.
Do you want the absolute minimum, alone? → Bonsai, eyes open on per-user pricing.
Is delivering profitably the bottleneck? → Stria.

Plenty of established freelancers arrive at the fourth eventually. Lead flow stabilises, and the difference between a good year and a thin one stops being how many projects you won and becomes how much margin leaked out of the ones you already had.

Test it on one real project

No comparison table settles this, including ours. Stria's free plan reaches the whole loop on one job — lock a scope, take a verified sign-off, send an invoice — before you pay anything. Start a 14-day trial at getstria.com, or read the deeper single-vendor comparison in HoneyBook vs Stria.