Delivvo vs HoneyBook in 2026: After the 89% Price Hike
HoneyBook's Starter plan jumped from $19 to $36/month in February 2025. Delivvo runs $15/month. Here's where the price gap matches a feature gap — and where it doesn't.
The Delivvo team· May 6, 2026 8 min read
In February 2025, HoneyBook quietly repriced every plan: Starter went from $19/month to $36/month (an 89% increase), Essentials from $35 to $59 (69%), and Premium from $79 to $129 (63%). The annual prices — $29 / $49 / $109 per month when paid up front — soften the blow but don't eliminate it (HoneyBook official pricing). The 100,000+ creative-business customers HoneyBook now serves (Sacra company brief) had a real choice to make: absorb the increase, switch tools, or stay on the legacy rate where grandfathered.
We built Delivvo for one of those three groups. This post is the honest comparison in May 2026 — what HoneyBook is genuinely better at, where Delivvo focuses differently, and how the price gap maps to feature differences.
The 2026 pricing picture, side by side
Keep reading
HoneyBook runs three tiers. Pricing as of May 2026 (HoneyBook pricing):
Starter — $36/month or $29/month annual. Unlimited clients and projects, invoices, contracts, basic reports, 2 lead forms.
Essentials — $59/month or $49 annual. Adds scheduler, automations, QuickBooks Online, 2 team members, SMS reminders.
Payment processing — 2.9% + $0.25 for cards, 1.5% for ACH bank transfers.
Delivvo runs one price point: $15/month with a 7-day free trial. Branded client portal at every plan, unlimited clients, files, contracts, Stripe-native invoicing, and approvals. Payment processing pass-through to Stripe at Stripe's stock rate (no markup beyond Stripe's published fees).
The realistic apples-to-apples comparison is HoneyBook Starter at $29/month annual vs Delivvo at $15/month. That's the same client-portal core — files, approvals, contracts, invoices, branded URL — for roughly half the cost.
Where HoneyBook is genuinely better
Three things HoneyBook does that Delivvo doesn't try to:
A full creative-business CRM. HoneyBook is twelve years old, raised $155 million through 2021 (Crunchbase via Sacra), and built lead-capture forms, automated client journeys, scheduler, contract templates, and an "AI assistant" feature into one suite. If you're a wedding photographer running 80 weddings a year, HoneyBook's lead form → contract → scheduler → invoice → review-request automation is a real productivity win.
The template marketplace. HoneyBook's library of contract, brochure, and questionnaire templates — many created by working creatives — is meaningfully bigger than anything we ship. New users can assemble a working business in an afternoon by remixing community templates.
Industry network effects. When 100,000 creative businesses run HoneyBook, the photographers and videographers and event planners you collaborate with often already have it. Two HoneyBook accounts can sometimes hand off a project more cleanly than two unrelated tools.
If your business is built around the lead-form → automated nurture → booked-call → contract → deposit flow that HoneyBook automates end to end, HoneyBook earns its price.
Hands on a laptop reviewing a contract draft in late-afternoon light — the kind of paperwork moment HoneyBook built its CRM around and Delivvo solves with a simpler portal
Where Delivvo focuses differently
Three places we deliberately picked the other side:
Branded portal at every plan, not just the top tier. HoneyBook's white-label custom domain lives behind Premium at $109–$129/month. Delivvo's branded subdomain (portal.yourbrand.com) ships at $15. For freelancers who care about clients seeing your name, not the platform's, this matters from day one.
One price, no upsell ladder. HoneyBook's Starter intentionally lacks scheduler, automations, and integrations to push you toward Essentials. Delivvo's $15 plan is the only plan. Either it's enough or it isn't — there's no version where you discover at month three that the feature you need lives a tier up.
A delivery tool, not a CRM. Delivvo doesn't try to be your lead-capture funnel, your CRM, or your automated email sequence. It's the place files, approvals, contracts, and invoices live for clients you already have. Most freelancers we talk to already have a CRM (a spreadsheet, Notion, or HubSpot's free tier) and don't need a second one — they need a clean place to deliver the work and get paid.
Payment processing: where HoneyBook quietly costs more
Both tools take a payment-processing fee on top of the subscription. HoneyBook's stock rate of 2.9% + $0.25 per card transaction matches Stripe's standard rate (Stripe pricing) — meaning HoneyBook isn't marking up payment processing on its base tier. ACH at 1.5% is a tighter margin than Stripe's 0.8% (capped at $5), so HoneyBook does take a small spread there.
Delivvo passes through to Stripe directly. You connect your own Stripe account; Stripe charges its published rate; Delivvo doesn't add anything on top. For a freelancer running $8,000/month through invoices, the ACH delta alone is roughly $56/month — almost four times the Delivvo subscription itself.
This is the case for any platform that "owns" payments vs one that brokers them. HoneyBook owns payments and bundles them into the experience; Delivvo brokers Stripe and lets you keep the relationship.
Look at HoneyBook's Essentials feature list and the gap to Delivvo seems wide. Look at what *most freelancers actually use* and the gap narrows:
Scheduler → Calendly's free tier covers 95% of cases.
Automations → most freelancers use 2–3 simple ones (welcome email, deposit reminder, project-complete email) that any email tool handles.
QuickBooks Online integration → relevant for the ~30% of freelancers who already pay for QBO.
SMS reminders → meaningful for in-person photographers; near-zero value for remote freelancers.
Lead capture forms → most freelancers' leads come through their site or referrals, not a HoneyBook-hosted form.
If you use 2 of those 5, HoneyBook Essentials at $49/month annual makes sense. If you use 4–5, HoneyBook Essentials is an obvious win. If you use 0–1, Delivvo at $15/month is doing the same job at a third of the price.
Who should pick which
The honest decision tree, after twelve months of helping people switch in both directions:
Pick HoneyBook if:
You're in weddings, portrait photography, event planning, or another creative service where the lead-form → contract → scheduler → invoice flow drives most revenue
You bill more than $10,000/month and the suite of features pays for itself in admin time saved
You already use HoneyBook templates and the switching cost feels real
Pick Delivvo if:
You're a designer, dev, copywriter, consultant, or strategist where deliverables and approvals matter more than lead capture
You already have a CRM (Notion, Pipedrive, HubSpot free) and don't want a second one
Brand control of the client portal matters from day one, not at the $109/month tier
The payment-processing pass-through to Stripe matters more than bundled payments
Frequently asked questions
Did HoneyBook grandfather existing customers at the old prices?
HoneyBook offered limited grandfathering for existing annual subscribers in early 2025, but new subscribers and renewing monthly subscribers landed on the new pricing. By May 2026, most customers are paying the post-hike rates (HoneyBook help center).
Can I import HoneyBook contacts and projects into Delivvo?
Delivvo accepts CSV imports for clients and projects. HoneyBook's data export covers clients, projects, invoices, and contracts in CSV/PDF, and the field mapping is straightforward. The piece that doesn't migrate cleanly is HoneyBook's automation graphs — those have to be rebuilt by hand because Delivvo doesn't try to replicate that surface.
What about the AI features HoneyBook keeps marketing?
HoneyBook's AI features in 2026 cover smart-reply suggestions and auto-fill on lead forms. They're useful but not category-defining — and most freelancers we surveyed get more value from a paid ChatGPT or Claude subscription used directly than from in-app AI suggestions inside any one tool.
Is Delivvo really half the price of HoneyBook?
$15/month vs $29/month annual for Starter is roughly half. The bigger gap is when freelancers actually need scheduler + automations and end up on Essentials at $49 annual — that's three-and-a-bit times Delivvo. The price gap widens as the HoneyBook plan goes up.
Does Delivvo have a contract template library?
Yes — Delivvo ships the ten most-used freelance contract types (creative-services agreement, retainer, master services, NDA, etc.) and lets you upload your own. The library is smaller than HoneyBook's by design; we'd rather ship ten that work cleanly than 100 you have to vet.
The takeaway
HoneyBook's 2025 price hike turned what used to be a reasonable $19/month entry point into a $36/month commitment. For some businesses — wedding photographers, event planners, anyone whose entire workflow lives inside HoneyBook's automation graph — the new price is still worth it.
For the freelancer who mostly needs a clean, branded place for files, approvals, contracts, and invoices, the price gap maps to a feature surface you weren't going to use anyway. That's the cohort Delivvo built for.
Either way, the right choice in 2026 is the one that lines up with what your week actually looks like — not what a feature matrix on a pricing page implies.
Delivvo is the branded client portal for freelancers who want files, approvals, contracts, and Stripe-native invoices in one place — at $15/month, free for 7 days. The same client-portal core HoneyBook charges $29–$109/month for, without the rest of the CRM you may not need.
