Bonsai is an all-in-one freelancer back office, covering proposals, contracts, invoicing, time tracking, expense management, even taxes. Quotify is the embedded pricing form that lives on the front of your site, qualifying leads before they ever email you. Different stage of the funnel; often used side by side.
Solo freelancers (designers, developers, copywriters, consultants)
WHERE QUOTIFY WINS
Customers self-serve a real price on your website before enquiring
Pre-qualifies leads (budget, scope, urgency) before they cost you a reply
Embeds on any site you already have, no platform lock-in
Free tier, no card required
Single small surface, live in 30 minutes
WHERE BONSAI WINS
Genuinely all-in-one (proposal → contract → invoice → tax in one app)
Strong template library tuned for solo freelancers
Built-in time tracking + project profitability
Tax-time tools (US-focused but useful)
One subscription instead of five (Notion + DocuSign + Stripe + Toggl + ...)
When to pick which
PICK QUOTIFY IF…
You're a freelancer or solo studio with a website (or even just a
Linktree-style bio) and you want prospects to be able to self-serve a
*price* before they slide into your DMs at 11pm. Your services have
enough variables (scope, deliverables, timeline) that "request a quote"
forms cost you sleep, and you want to fix that one specific problem
without changing the rest of your stack.
PICK BONSAI IF…
You're a freelancer running on a stitched-together stack: Google
Docs for proposals, DocuSign for contracts, Stripe links for
invoices, Toggl for time, a spreadsheet for taxes. You want
to consolidate the *whole* back office into one tool. The
pricing/quoting step isn't your biggest pain; the admin sprawl is.
The verdict
Bonsai is the freelancer's back-office toolkit: proposals, contracts, invoices, time tracking, expenses, even tax estimates, all in one subscription. It exists because solo freelancers don't want to stitch together five separate tools to run their admin. Quotify is the OPPOSITE shape: one tiny thing, done well. A pricing widget on your public site that turns "how much do you charge?" enquiries into pre-qualified leads with a real number attached. They live in different parts of your business. Bonsai inside (admin, ops, finance); Quotify outside (your shopfront). Most freelancers who use both put Quotify on the website and Bonsai on the back end.
Different jobs, very different shape
Bonsai is the freelancer’s back-office bundle. One subscription gives you a proposal builder, contract templates with e-sign, recurring invoices with Stripe-backed payments, time tracking, expense management, and tax-prep tools (US-leaning). It’s the tool that exists because solo freelancers got tired of paying for Notion + DocuSign + Stripe + Toggl + QuickBooks separately.
Quotify is a single-purpose widget. It lives on your public website. Its only job is to take a “how much do you charge?” question and give the visitor a real, instant, qualified answer, without them having to fill in a generic enquiry form and wait two days for your reply.
Bonsai is wide and shallow-to-deep across the freelancer admin stack. Quotify is narrow and laser-focused on one moment: the moment a stranger lands on your site and wants to know what you charge.
The honest pitch for each
Pick Bonsai if the admin tax of being a freelancer is what’s eating your evenings. You’ve got enough enquiries; what you don’t have is a clean way to send a proposal, get it signed, raise an invoice, chase payment, log hours, and have your tax forecast not be a January panic. Bonsai consolidates that into one app and one bill.
Pick Quotify if your problem is upstream: the enquiries themselves. Visitors hit your site, see “Contact me for pricing”, and bounce. Your DMs are full of the same “how much for…?” question. You spend your evenings writing the same “rough cost is around £X depending on…” reply for the tenth time. That’s the gap Quotify closes: instant priced answer on the site, qualified lead through to your existing process.
Could you use both?
Yes. The pattern that works:
Quotify on the public site captures and qualifies leads with a real number attached
Bonsai on the back end turns each qualified lead into a proposal, contract, invoice, paid project
The handoff is clean because Quotify’s email notification already contains the priced brief; you copy it into the Bonsai proposal in 30 seconds (or paste the URL of the submission as context).
Where Bonsai is bigger than Quotify will ever be
Bonsai’s a deliberately broad tool. Things it covers that Quotify doesn’t:
Proposals and contracts. Bonsai has signed-template-driven proposals, e-signature, version tracking. Quotify stops at “lead in your inbox.”
Invoicing and payment links. Bonsai sends invoices, accepts Stripe payments, handles recurring billing, sends late-payment chasers. Quotify produces a quote PDF; what happens after is your existing flow.
Time tracking and project profitability. Bonsai’s “did I actually make money on that project?” maths is built in. Quotify doesn’t touch this.
Expense and tax tools. Bonsai forecasts your tax bill and lets you log expenses. Useful, and entirely outside Quotify’s surface area.
If you need any of those, Bonsai (or a similar all-in-one like Dubsado or HoneyBook) is the answer. If you don’t, if your back office is sorted and your bottleneck is the front of the funnel, Quotify is the smaller, sharper tool to add.
Where Quotify earns its place even if you have Bonsai
Bonsai’s proposal builder is excellent, once a lead exists. It does nothing to get leads. The “request a proposal” link on your website is still a generic “fill in this form and we’ll get back to you” experience. If that’s where prospects bounce, you can have the best back office in freelancing and still have an empty pipeline.
Quotify slots in before Bonsai: visitors who’d otherwise have bounced complete a structured form, see a real price, and become a qualified Bonsai-ready lead. The two tools cover non-overlapping stages of the funnel, and a lot of freelancers run both for exactly that reason.
FAQ
Can I use Quotify with Bonsai?
Yes, and a lot of freelancers do. Quotify lives on your public website to convert browsers into priced, qualified leads. Bonsai handles what happens next, turning that lead into a proposal, contract, invoice, paid project. They don't overlap; they hand off.
Is Bonsai overkill if I just want a quote form?
Yes, probably. Bonsai's value is in covering the whole back office, from proposals and contracts to invoicing, time tracking, taxes. If you just need a price-estimator widget on your site, you'd be paying for nine features to use one. Quotify exists for that case.
Does Quotify do invoicing or contracts?
No. Quotify intentionally stops at the priced-and-qualified-lead stage. For contracts, e-signatures, invoices and payments you'd pair it with Bonsai, Dubsado, HoneyBook, Stripe, or any tool you're already using for client admin.
Is Quotify cheaper than Bonsai?
At list price, yes. Quotify has a free tier and Pro is £29/mo. Bonsai's Starter is $25/mo. But they do completely different things, so price-per-feature isn't comparable. The right question is "what's my biggest bottleneck?", then get the tool that solves it.
I'm not based in the US, is Bonsai still useful?
It's mostly US-tuned (tax features especially), but plenty of UK and EU freelancers use it for the proposal/contract/invoice side. The pricing's in USD though, which adds an FX layer you don't get with Quotify, which is UK-based and billed in GBP.