$847/year in subscriptions. Gone.
Here's what my tool stack looked like six months ago as a freelance designer:
- HoneyBook — Client management and invoicing ($39/month)
- Toggl — Time tracking ($10/month)
- Notion — Notes and docs (free)
- Google Sheets — Financial tracking (free)
- Trello — Project boards (free tier)
That's $588/year in paid tools, plus the invisible cost of switching between five different apps and manually copying data between them. Client details in HoneyBook didn't sync to my project board in Trello. Time logged in Toggl had to be manually cross-referenced with invoices in HoneyBook. My financial tracking in Sheets was always out of date because updating it meant pulling data from three places.
What I replaced them with
One Notion workspace with four connected databases:
Clients — Every client has a row. Contact info, project history (auto-populated via relation), total revenue (rollup from invoices), and communication notes. This replaced HoneyBook's CRM.
Projects — Each project links to a client. Status, deadline, deliverables, and hours logged are all tracked here. Kanban view for at-a-glance status. Timeline view for deadline management. This replaced Trello.
Time log — Date, project (relation), task, start time, end time, calculated duration. Weekly view grouped by project. This replaced Toggl.
Invoices — Amount, client (relation), date sent, date paid, status. A formula shows days outstanding. A rollup on the client record shows total revenue. This replaced HoneyBook's invoicing and Google Sheets.
The result
$0/month in subscriptions (Notion's free plan). Zero context-switching between apps. Every piece of data entered once and visible everywhere it matters.
I built this myself over a weekend, but if I were starting today, I'd just duplicate the Freelancer Command Center. It has exactly this setup — plus an expense tracker and revenue dashboard — ready to go in 2 minutes.
Want the full stack? The Freelancer Stack adds a content calendar and finance dashboard for $89 total.