Dubsado pricing, explained (2026)

Dubsado costs $35 per month for Starter and $55 per month for Premier, or $335 and $525 a year if you pay annually, which knocks off about two months. The free trial runs 21 days with full Premier access and no credit card. That is the entire pricing story. The simplicity is the best thing about it.

The buying questions sit underneath it. What does the Premier upgrade actually buy? What do the add-ons cost once your team grows past three people? And does the widely repeated complaint that Dubsado stopped developing still hold? According to Dubsado's own pricing page and changelog, the answer to that last one is no. Most review roundups have not caught up. Every number below comes from those pages, checked August 2026, and linked in Sources. The only Dubsado plan that automates is Premier, at $55 per month billed monthly, as of August 2026.

I am the founder of a client-onboarding tool that competes with Dubsado (though not on its CRM or invoicing depth), so I have a stake here. The prices are Dubsado's, the reviewer quotes are real, and the disclosure is at the bottom.

The two plans, side by side

Two plans, one real decision line, drawn between manual and automated. Starter runs your invoicing, templates, and one intake form by hand. Premier adds the scheduler and the workflow engine that does the chasing for you. The gap is $20 a month, which is too small for price to be what you are deciding. The single decision that sets your Dubsado bill is whether you want automation at all.

The trial and the fine print

Dubsado's trial is 21 days of full, unlimited Premier access, and it does not ask for a credit card, per the pricing page. That is generous. You test the top tier before paying anything, workflows and scheduler included, and Starter never gets either one.

Treat the trial as a build sprint, not a look-around. On day one, set up one real workflow. By the second week, run an actual client through a proposal, contract, and invoice. That is how you see the parts Starter would lock away. A trial you never load with real work expires before it teaches you anything.

What Premier actually buys

Premier is the automation plan. Four gates matter. All four sit on the Premier side of the line:

• Automated workflows. This is the headline. Starter automates nothing. Every reminder, status change, and follow-up is a click you make yourself. Premier runs the sequence for you. If you are buying client software to stop chasing people, Starter defeats the purpose.
• The scheduler. Built-in booking lives on Premier only. Starter lets you connect a calendar and look at it. Clients cannot self-book through Dubsado, so you keep a separate scheduling tool.
• Unlimited lead-capture forms. Starter allows exactly one active lead-capture form. Two service lines that intake differently already put you on Premier.
• Public proposals and Zapier. Public proposals (shareable without a client login) and the Zapier connection are both Premier-only.

The pricing page does not spell out the client login model for the portal. It lists the portal on both plans and says nothing about whether clients need an account. If passwordless client access matters to you, ask Dubsado directly before committing. The page confirms the feature exists. It does not say how clients reach it.

Add-ons and payment processing

Dubsado's add-ons are cheap and predictable, which is part of why the pricing reads as honest. Extra users are billed as a flat tier fee rather than strictly per seat:

A five-person team on Premier pays $55 plus $25, or $80 a month. That same $25 covers you all the way to ten people. Additional brands cost $10 per month each, if you run more than one business identity out of one account.

Payments run through connected processors, not Dubsado's own rails. You link Stripe, Square, or PayPal in one of two combinations: Stripe plus PayPal, or Square plus PayPal. Not Stripe and Square at the same time. You pay each processor's standard rates directly, and for Stripe that is the usual card processing fee. Dubsado's pricing page does not disclose an added platform fee on top of the processor rate. Confirm that against your own first payout rather than take it on faith.

To compute your own annual Dubsado cost before you buy:

1. Pick the plan your workflow forces. If you need automation or the scheduler, start from Premier at $525 per year, not the $335 Starter figure.
2. Count your team. The first 3 users are free; add $25 per month for 4 to 10 people, $45 for 11 to 20, or $60 for 21 to 30.
3. Add $10 per month for each extra brand you run.
4. Total the three lines. A five-person Premier firm, for example, is $525 plus $300 in user fees, or $825 a year.

Did development really stall?

This is the criticism that follows Dubsado around, and it deserves a straight answer. The reviews are real. On Capterra (4.2 out of 5 across 61 reviews) and SoftwareAdvice (the same 4.2 and 61, drawn from the same review pool), three knocks repeat. Screens that feel clunky, a learning curve, and email-only support that is slow. One reviewer put it plainly: "Overall it just feels a bit clunky and perhaps too expensive and heavy for my business." Another flagged workflow reliability: "The workflows malfunction frequently and even though it's paused it will send an email not meant to be sent." Those complaints are worth weighing.

But the specific charge that Dubsado stopped shipping is out of date. The evidence is public.

The fair reading is that Dubsado earned the "dated and slow" reputation on its older product, then spent a rebuild paying it down. It is still climbing out of the review lag. A rating gathered over years moves slowly even when the software underneath it changes fast. Read the complaints, then check whether they describe the product as it exists in 2026.

The same lag shows up in the prices. A number of review directories still list Dubsado at $20 and $40 per month, older figures the vendor's own $35 and $55 replaced. If you are researching a possible "Dubsado price increase," that gap is where the confusion starts. Rising prices are the norm across this category, not a Dubsado quirk, as our roundup of client software price hikes, 2020 to 2026 lays out.

Dubsado against the alternatives on price

Dubsado is a full client-management suite: CRM, invoicing, contracts, workflows, and onboarding in one place. The breadth is the value and the cost, on the same line item. If you want the whole lifecycle in one tool, the comparison that matters most is with HoneyBook. We break it down separately in HoneyBook vs Dubsado. The HoneyBook pricing breakdown covers what that side of the trade costs.

Your actual job may be narrower: collect documents, get a contract signed, take a deposit, and stop chasing. Then a suite may be more tool than the task needs. Here is Dubsado against a focused onboarding option, on the numbers that drive the bill:

The trade is real in both directions. Dubsado bundles invoicing, a CRM, and proposals that a pure onboarding tool does not touch. Portico is an onboarding tool only: no CRM, no built-in invoicing, no time tracking. It collects documents, runs intake forms, and handles e-signatures and payments through your own Stripe. It prices on onboarding volume rather than seats, with unlimited team members on every plan including the free one. Different jobs. Our own writeup of when you do not need onboarding software is the honest test for which side you are on. There is a broader field of Dubsado alternatives if neither fits.

Who should buy Dubsado

Buy Dubsado, on Premier, if you are a service business (a creative, coach, consultant, or small agency) that wants one tool to hold the client relationship end to end: lead form, proposal, contract, invoice, and the workflows that move a client through them without manual chasing. At $525 a year that is inexpensive for the scope. The add-on pricing stays gentle as you grow. The 3.0 rebuild has addressed much of the old "dated" complaint. Take the 21-day trial seriously and build a real workflow inside it.

Do not buy Dubsado if you only need to collect documents and take a deposit. A lighter onboarding tool does that job for less, with fewer screens to learn. Do not buy Starter expecting automation. There is none on that plan. And if international tax handling is central to your work, read the reviews first. An Australian reviewer flagged that Dubsado "didn't handle GST very well" and that its Xero sync got data "mixed up between the two." Pressure-test that path in the trial before you rely on it.

Disclosure

This article's publisher competes in the client-onboarding category, so treat this as an informed but interested source. Every Dubsado price and feature here comes from Dubsado's own pricing page and changelog, checked August 3, 2026, with sources linked above; the review scores and quotes are from Capterra and SoftwareAdvice. Our editorial policy explains how we handle competitor coverage. Spot a stale number? Email support@portico.run and it will be corrected within 24 hours.