Doing the math
What ActBook replaces — and what that stack actually costs you.
Nobody sets out to pay for seven subscriptions. It happens one problem at a time. You need a booking link, so you get Calendly. You need contracts, so you add something for that. A website, a cold-email tool, a waiver app — each one solved a real problem on the day you signed up. Then the cards hit every month and you realize you're running your act on a pile of tools that don't talk to each other. Here's the honest tally of what most working performers end up paying, and how ActBook does the same jobs under one login.
Prices below are the common paid plans as of this writing, rounded to the dollar — the tier a working act actually lands on, not the cheapest teaser or the enterprise quote. Yours will vary. The point isn't the exact figure; it's the shape of the bill.
The stack, tool by tool
| The job | What you'd use | ~ / mo | In ActBook | Tier |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Scheduling & a self-booking link | Calendly | $12 | A booking link clients tap to pick a date and show — with travel-time math so it won't hand out a slot you can't physically reach in time. | Act |
| CRM, contracts & invoices | HoneyBook / Dubsado | $36 | A client list and a pipeline that tracks every enquiry from quote to paid, with invoices and deposits built in. | Act |
| E-signatures | DocuSign | $15 | Contracts e-sign right inside the booking — no separate signing service, no print-sign-scan. | Act |
| A website | Squarespace | $16 | Your own ActBook website, with the booking link baked in. On Agency, a separate site for each act you represent. | Act |
| Cold email / outreach | Instantly | $37 | An outreach engine that sends sequences from your own mailboxes, warms them up, and routes replies back into your pipeline. | Agent+ |
| Liability waivers | Smartwaiver | $25 | Digital liability waivers with QR passes, so guests sign on their phone before they ever step on the mat. | Agent+ |
| The duct-taped stack | $141 | every month, across six logins | ||
That's about $141 a month — roughly $1,700 a year — before you count the hidden cost that doesn't show up on any invoice: the tools don't share data. A booking in one doesn't become a contract in another. You re-type the client's name four times, reconcile a deposit by hand, and cross your fingers that the calendar everyone's looking at is the real one.
The subscriptions were never the expensive part. The expensive part was being the integration between them.
Where ActBook lands — and what's honestly on which plan
We'd rather be straight with you than make the comparison look better than it is. ActBook comes in three tiers, and not everything above is on the entry plan. Here's the honest split.
Act
$29/mo
The booking link with travel-time math, the CRM and pipeline, contracts with e-sign, invoices and deposits, and your website. That's Calendly, HoneyBook/Dubsado, DocuSign and Squarespace — about $79/mo of tools — in one login for $29.
Agent
$79/mo
Everything in Act, plus the cold-email outreach engine and liability waivers — and access to the buyer lead directory (the leads themselves are billed as you go). This is the tier that replaces the ~$140/mo stack — so it pays for itself and then some.
Agency
$249/mo
Everything in Agent, built for booking many acts — a separate website per act, team members, and assignments. For an agency, it replaces that stack several times over.
So the fair version is this: outreach and waivers start at Agent, not on the $29 Act plan. If all you need is the booking-to-paid core — link, CRM, contracts, invoices, website — Act covers roughly $79/mo of separate tools for $29. If you also run cold outreach, Agent covers the ~$140/mo stack for $79 (and the buyer lead directory is there too, billed per lead rather than a flat subscription). Either way the comparison holds; it just lands on a different line depending on what you actually do.
One login, not six
The money matters, but the thing that actually changes your week is that it's one system. A client taps your link, picks a date it knows you can reach, signs the contract and pays the deposit — and it's already a booking in your pipeline, on the one calendar that's true. No export, no re-typing, no reconciling. The seven jobs still get done. You just stop being the glue between seven apps.
More like this, occasionally.
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If you want to run the numbers for yourself, the pricing page lays out exactly what's on each tier. And if you're weighing a specific tool, we've written up two of the common ones head-to-head: ActBook vs. Calendly and ActBook vs. HoneyBook.
About the prices. Figures are representative paid-plan monthly costs for each named tool as of this writing, rounded to the nearest dollar, chosen to reflect the plan a working solo act or small agency typically lands on rather than the cheapest or the enterprise tier. Pricing changes and billing cycles differ (several of these are cheaper paid annually), so treat the $140 as the shape of a typical bill, not a quote. ActBook tiers are $29 (Act), $79 (Agent) and $249 (Agency); the feature split above reflects what's included on each.