The number on the pricing page is the smallest number you'll pay. Not because vendors lie about it, but because the pricing page answers one question (what does a seat cost?) and running an agency asks four or five more.

Here's the full list, with a worksheet at the end. And since we sell one of these platforms, the last section says plainly what Nymble does and doesn't charge for, including the parts that aren't flattering.

1. Payment processing fees

Some platforms bundle invoicing with their own payment rails and take a cut of every invoice paid through them. Two to three percent sounds like a rounding error until you do the multiplication. An agency collecting $50,000 a month through the platform is handing over $1,000 to $1,500 a month. At $150,000 it's $3,000 to $4,500, which at that point is more than the subscription.

Ask: is there a fee on payments? Can clients pay by ACH or wire outside the platform without losing invoice tracking? Can you plug in your own Stripe account and keep your own rate?

2. The tier you'll actually be on

Every vendor with tiers, us included, prices the entry plan for the agency you are today and the upper plans for the agency you'll be in a year. That's not a trick, but it does mean the entry price is the wrong number to compare.

The pattern goes: you start mid-tier because it covers current needs. A quarter later you want branded client documents, and that's the top tier. Two quarters after that, you've outgrown the automation limits. Each step feels small. The cumulative jump from a $15 seat to a $59 seat doesn't.

The features that most often live upstairs: white-labeling, automation rules, granular permissions, API access, advanced reporting, priority support.

Ask: write down what you need now and what you'll need in twelve months. Find the tier that covers the twelve-month list. That's your real per-seat price.

3. Zapier as a line item, and as a risk

When the platform lacks a native integration, you pay twice. Once for the middleware (Zapier Professional runs $49 to $69 a month; Make is similar) and again every time it breaks.

And it breaks. A Zap that syncs invoices to QuickBooks fails on a Friday afternoon and nobody notices until the bookkeeper asks why March is missing. We've seen a sync sit dead for eleven days. The cleanup took two people two days, which cost more than a year of the Zapier plan.

Native integrations shift that risk to the vendor. When their HubSpot import breaks, it's their bug.

Ask: which integrations are native, which are Zapier, and is there an API for the ones that are neither?

4. Onboarding, paid or unpaid

Guided onboarding quotes we've seen range from $500 to $5,000. Free onboarding isn't free either. A dense platform can eat 40 to 80 hours of your team's time to configure and learn. At a $150 blended rate that's $6,000 to $12,000 of billable time you didn't bill.

Ask: how long does a typical agency take to go live, and who does the work?

5. Getting your data out

Switching is expensive on purpose. It's how platforms keep you. Before you're in, find out how you'd get out:

Can you export contacts, contracts, projects, time entries, and invoices?
In CSV or JSON, or something proprietary?
Is there a bulk export API?
Do signed agreements stay accessible after you cancel?

If the answer to any of those is a shrug, price that in.

6. The tools it doesn't replace

This is usually the biggest number and the one nobody puts on the comparison sheet.

No e-signature? That's DocuSign or PandaDoc at $25 to $50 a seat.
No CRM? That's HubSpot or Pipedrive plus someone keeping two systems in agreement.
No time tracking? That's Harvest or Toggl, and the weekly copy-paste into invoices.
No AI that can see your data? That's a ChatGPT subscription and a lot of pasting.

Each one adds a subscription, an integration, and a tab. The tabs are the expensive part. Twenty minutes a day of hunting across tools, per person, is two working weeks a year.

The worksheet

Cost	Per month
Seats × the tier you'll be on in 12 months	$
Payment fees (monthly collections × fee %)	$
Middleware (Zapier, Make)	$
Tools the platform doesn't replace	$
Onboarding, spread over 12 months	$
Total	$

Fill it in for each platform on your shortlist. Compare the totals, not the top row.

What Nymble charges, and doesn't

Tiers, yes. Core is $29 per user per month, Pro $49 (or $19 and $32 billed annually). Core doesn't include automation workflows, team skills, custom roles, or assignments, and it's capped at 100 contracts. If you need any of those, Pro is your real price. We'd rather you know that from this page than from an upgrade prompt in month three. The full comparison is on the pricing page.

Payment fees, no, because we don't process payments. Nymble builds and tracks invoices; your clients pay you through your own bank or processor. No cut, and no platform sitting between you and your money.

E-signature included on every plan, so there's no DocuSign line.

CRM included, with a one-way import from HubSpot if that's where your sales history lives.

AI credits included: 500 or 1,000 per user per month by tier, then $0.10 a credit. An Ask Nymble question uses one credit however many lookups it takes. Domain technology lookups cost 10 credits each.

Onboarding is self-serve, and most teams are logging time and sending an invoice inside the first week.

Fourteen-day trial, no card. Run the worksheet with our numbers in it and see how it comes out against the others.

The Hidden Costs of Agency Management Software