AlternativesUpdated
Dubsado runs invoices, payments, contracts, proposals, forms, scheduling and client portals for service businesses, billed by the year: Starter is $335 a year with 1 lead capture form, and Premier $525. If you would rather pay monthly, want one price for everything, or a portal shaped around your service, here are four alternatives.

Starter is $335 a year and Premier $525, after a 21-day free trial of Premier.
Starter includes 1 lead capture form; workflows are on Premier.
HoneyBook Essentials is $59 a month billed monthly, for up to 2 team members.
Fits: HoneyBookEach client signs in to see their own updates, approvals and invoices, in a portal you describe, with no price per client.
Fits: FabricateFabricate beside Dubsado, feature by feature.
Best for: A portal shaped around your service
Describe your service and what each client needs to see and send you, and Fabricate builds the portal: updates and milestones, approvals, uploads, and invoices with a pay button, behind a sign-in where each client sees only their own. Clients join with an invite code you give them, and the people who sign in to a published portal are not counted as seats. Contract templates with e-signatures and emails to clients about updates are not built in. Building and previewing are free; publishing is on Pro and Max.
Checks before you publish

What it does well
Save your client list from Dubsado as a CSV file.
What each client sees and sends you, the stages a project goes through, and how they pay.
Ask for a page, behind your own sign-in, that adds the rows of your CSV file to the app's own database.
Check in the preview that each client sees only their own work and invoices.
On Pro, one press of Publish gives it its own address to share, after the same browser check.
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Your app

What each one does well, and the kind of project it suits best.
Best for: Freelancers and creative services
Client management for service businesses: proposals, contracts, invoices and payments, scheduling and a client portal, with unlimited clients. Starter is $29 a month billed yearly; Essentials is $59 billed monthly, or $49 yearly, for up to 2 team members.
Where HoneyBook beats Fabricate
If your work runs from proposal to contract to invoice, HoneyBook does that path out of the box, with a client portal on every plan.
Source: honeybook.com/pricing (opens in a new tab), checked
Best for: Everything for a service business in one place
An all-in-one business platform with a client portal, contracts and e-signatures, client onboarding, projects and white label, sold at one price rather than per user. START is $19 a month, THRIVE $49 and PINNACLE $99, after a 14-day free trial.
Where SuiteDash beats Fabricate
If you want a portal, contracts, onboarding and projects from one company at one flat price, SuiteDash has them ready to switch on.
Source: suitedash.com/pricing (opens in a new tab), checked
Best for: A portal on data you already keep
Builds client portals and internal tools from a description with its AI Co-Builder, on Softr's own databases or on data you keep in Airtable or Google Sheets. Its Free plan covers up to 3 builders and 5 app users; Basic is $25 a month, and each plan caps the app users who sign in.
Where Softr beats Fabricate
If your client records already live in Airtable or Google Sheets, a Softr portal can sit on them directly.
Sources: softr.io/pricing (opens in a new tab), checked ; Softr docs: AI Co-Builder (opens in a new tab), checked
Dubsado covers the paperwork of a service business: invoices, payments, contracts, proposals, forms, scheduling and client portals, with unlimited clients. It is billed by the year: Starter is $335 with 1 lead capture form, and Premier $525 with workflows.
HoneyBook covers the same path from $29 a month billed yearly, or $59 billed monthly on Essentials. SuiteDash sells a portal, contracts, onboarding and projects at one price for unlimited users, from $19 a month. Softr builds portals on data you keep in Airtable or Google Sheets.
A business that sends proposals and contracts for every job is the one Dubsado and HoneyBook are built for. A business whose clients mainly need to see where their work stands, send files and pay needs a portal shaped around that.
A client portal built with Fabricate is your own web app. Each client signs in with an invite code you give them and sees only their own updates, approvals, uploads and invoices. On Pro and Max, the app can take card payments through Stripe Checkout, paid into your own Stripe account, which you connect under More > Payments. Contracts and proposals, emails to clients about updates, and documents for clients to download are not built in.
The pages this guide quotes, each with the day it was read.
About this guide
Written by the Fabricate team. Fabricate is our product, so it is first on this page and marked "We make this". Where a reason to switch fits another tool better, the reason says which.
Each tool's card lists the pages we read about it and the day we read them. We compared the tools from their own pricing pages and documentation, not by signing up for them. Spotted something out of date? Write to info@fabricate.build.
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