HoneyBook

So what does HoneyBook do that a spreadsheet and a folder of PDFs can't? It gets you booked and paid without the back and forth.

Say someone asks about a wedding shoot. You send one file. They pick a package, sign the contract and pay the deposit in the same sitting. No "can you resend the invoice?" three weeks later.

Every job then sits in a pipeline, from first enquiry to final payment. Each client gets one record with their emails, files, notes and payments in it.

It chases the money for you as well. Payment plans, autopay, reminders and late fees are all built in, and HoneyBook says 90% of its invoices get paid on time or early.

Clients and projects are unlimited on every plan, so a busy year doesn't bump up your bill.

And you don't start from a blank page. There are hundreds of templates, and once you subscribe their team will turn your old contracts and price lists into HoneyBook ones for free.

First question: where's your business? If it isn't in the US, Canada, the UK or Australia, you can't sign up. That's the end of it for now.

Then there's Starter. It sounds like enough, but it has no automations and no team members, and you get 1 scheduler session. The follow-ups that send themselves start on Essentials at $49.

Even Essentials stops at 2 team members. A studio of five is looking at Premium, at $109.

The phone app only does part of the job. HoneyBook's own help page calls it a supplement to the desktop, and you can't issue refunds, change company settings or get to your lead forms from it.

Honestly, the bit we'd think hardest about is the money. HoneyBook's payments page says it processes every card and bank payment itself, and it takes a fee each time. So don't count on plugging in the processor you already have. A card payment lands in two to three business days. A US bank transfer takes about a week.

Support is email and live chat, seven days a week. A few App Store reviewers from 2023 say a quick question took days to sort out.

There's no free plan. You get 30 days to try it, and no card is needed. That's long enough to send a real proposal and see how a client gets on with it.

Starter is $29 a month on yearly billing, or $36 month to month. You get unlimited clients and projects, invoices, proposals, contracts, the client portal and 2 live lead forms.

Essentials is $49, or $59 monthly. It's the one we'd expect most people to land on, because it adds automations, unlimited scheduler sessions, QuickBooks, Zapier, text reminders and 2 team members.

Premium is $109, or $129 monthly, with unlimited team members and priority support.

Then there are the fees. Cards start at 2.9% + 25¢ and bank transfers are 1.5%. (The pricing page also quotes 2.7% + 10¢, which the payments page gives as the tap to pay rate.) On a $2,000 deposit paid by card, that's about $58.

Not happy after paying? There's a 60-day money-back guarantee.

HoneyBook has 4.8 on the App Store from about 16,300 ratings. Nearly nine in ten of those are five stars.

Who's writing them? Wedding people, mostly. A photographer, a florist, a venue owner. The story is nearly always the same: everything used to live in spreadsheets, PDFs and notepads, and now it's in one place.

One photographer noticed clients booking faster once the proposals went out through it.

The venue owner adds a fair warning. It works if you run the whole business through it. Go half in and you won't see the point.

And the grumbles? Slow support, in a few reviews from 2023. Fees, from a cleaner doing small jobs. And the phone app, which one reviewer calls a companion to the website and no more.

We found nothing about it on Hacker News from the last two years. No shock there. It's built for florists and DJs, and they don't hang out on Hacker News.