Dubsado Hiked Starter 75% — Skip It, Use HoneyBook

Dubsado reset its pricing on December 1, 2025, timed to the Dubsado 3.0 relaunch. Starter jumped from $20 to $35/month — a 75% increase. Premier moved from $40 to $55/month. If you’re evaluating Dubsado for the first time in 2026, you’re looking at a platform where the affordable tier doesn’t include the features that make it worth using, and the full-featured tier now costs more than HoneyBook Essentials.

What Happened

Dubsado 3.0 launched in November 2025 as a full platform redesign. The pricing reset followed on December 1, 2025 — not announced through a press release, but buried in a FAQ on the 3.0 launch page. That’s the only primary record.

The new pricing structure for anyone signing up on or after December 1:

• Starter: $20/month → $35/month
• Premier: $40/month → $55/month

Subscribers on paid plans before December 1, 2025 are grandfathered indefinitely at the old rates. If you’re grandfathered at $20/month, do not cancel — lapsing your subscription means re-joining at $35/month.

The 3.0 rebuild also removed features during the transition. As of launch, Dubsado 3.0 ships without task dependencies, Gantt charts, or expense management. The mobile app is near-unusable. These aren’t deprecated features — they’re gaps in a platform new subscribers are paying 75% more to use while the rebuild stabilizes.

Why It Matters

The price increase closes the gap between Dubsado and HoneyBook in a way that favors HoneyBook for new evaluators.

Until December 2025, Dubsado had a genuine value argument: $20/month was a reasonable entry price for a platform with deep workflow customization and conditional logic forms — even with the notorious setup curve. At $35/month, the Starter tier collapses that argument. Here’s what $35/month on Dubsado Starter actually gets you:

• No workflow automation
• No scheduler
• No time tracker
• No public proposals
• One lead-capture form
• No Zapier integration
• No QuickBooks or Xero

The features that make Dubsado worth using — automation, scheduling, Zapier — live exclusively in Premier at $55/month. That’s the real entry price for anyone who wants Dubsado to function as a client ops platform.

Meanwhile, HoneyBook Essentials at $49/month (billed annually) includes automation workflows, scheduling, QuickBooks integration, Zapier, SMS reminders, and branded proposals — the full client ops loop, out of the box. HoneyBook Essentials is now cheaper than Dubsado Premier for solo freelancers, and it doesn’t require a 15–25 hour configuration phase to reach a production-ready state.

The market dynamic here is straightforward: HoneyBook raised prices in February 2025, which sent a wave of freelancers toward Dubsado and cheaper alternatives. Dubsado’s December 2025 increase reverses that. Both platforms now occupy similar price territory, but HoneyBook ships with a faster setup experience and a stable, fully-featured mobile app.

The Take

Skip Dubsado if you’re evaluating client ops software in 2026 and you don’t have a specific reason to need its deep conditional logic forms or multi-branch workflow customization. Those are real Dubsado advantages — for photographers managing complex booking flows or service businesses with intricate contract logic, Premier at $55/month still makes sense. But that’s a narrow use case.

For the creative freelancer who needs proposals, contracts, scheduling, and payment collection to work together without spending a week configuring the platform: HoneyBook Essentials is the pick. $49/month annually gets you everything Dubsado withholds at the Starter tier, a cleaner onboarding experience, and a platform that isn’t mid-rebuild.

If you’re currently grandfathered on Dubsado at $20/month, stay. The value equation is completely different at that price — you’re getting Premier-adjacent features (if you’re on the old Premier tier) or a functional Starter for less than any comparable alternative. The grandfathering survives indefinitely as long as you maintain your subscription.

The one group with a genuinely hard decision: freelancers on grandfathered Dubsado Starter at $20/month who are outgrowing it and considering upgrading to Premier. Upgrading within Dubsado means moving to the new $55/month Premier rate. At that point, HoneyBook Essentials at $49/month annual is cheaper and more feature-complete for most solo use cases. Run that comparison before you hit the upgrade button inside Dubsado.