A Bonsai alternative for proposals and getting paid

Where Bonsai is better

• Time becomes invoices

  Bonsai turns tracked hours and expenses into invoice lines. A consultancy that bills by the hour saves real effort there, because nothing is retyped. OneCraft has no timer and no timesheet, so hourly work has to be totalled elsewhere and entered as a quantity.

• Retainers bill themselves

  Recurring billing and saved cards let a monthly retainer charge without anyone touching it. OneCraft has no recurrence at all: a care plan at $180 a month is one line on the proposal, and each month's invoice would be raised by hand.

• It keeps the books

  Bonsai lists bookkeeping, expenses and a two way sync with QuickBooks Online and Xero. OneCraft stops at the invoice and its payment status, so a business that wants its ledger updated automatically will need its accounting software alongside.

• Leads arrive in a pipeline

  A CRM with pipeline stages, automations and a client portal holds a relationship from first enquiry to finished project. OneCraft keeps a list of clients for addressing proposals and nothing more.

Where OneCraft is different

• The draft is written for you

  Type what the job is, who it is for and what you charge, and the proposal arrives with its sections, one pricing table and numbered terms. A research step reads the client's website first, so the opening talks about their business rather than a template's.

• Accepting creates the invoices

  When the client accepts, the deposit invoice is issued and emailed straight away and the balance waits as a draft. Without a deposit, one invoice is issued due in 14 days. There is no separate step of building an invoice from the proposal.

• Proof of what was agreed

  A click acceptance appends a certificate page to the PDF with the signer's name and email, the time, IP address, browser, a hash of the content and the items they selected. That record answers the later question of what exactly the client said yes to.

A finished example

Business proposal template with the fixed fee on page oneMade with OneCraft, exactly as the generator and editor left it. Open the page for the full breakdown.

A suite against a single job

Bonsai's home page lists twenty product areas across client management, project management and finance. That breadth is the reason to buy it: one record follows a client from lead to project to invoice to the ledger. OneCraft Proposals does one job inside that chain. It is worth choosing when the proposal is where the hours go, when every quote is written from scratch in a word processor, or when the gap between yes and payment is the problem. A freelancer who already lives happily in a suite rarely needs a second tool for proposals.

Where the money moves

In OneCraft a card payment always goes through Stripe Checkout on the owner's connected Stripe account, and the money lands in that account rather than with OneCraft. Connecting Stripe needs a paid plan. The platform takes 2% of each payment on Starter, 1% on Pro and 0.5% on Pro+, and Stripe's own fees come on top. Bank details can be printed on the invoice instead, and a payment received that way is marked paid by hand. Bonsai lists cards, bank transfers and saved payment methods for repeat clients.

Packages against optional items

Bonsai frames choice as service packages, single or several. OneCraft frames it as items: each line can be optional, pre ticked or not, and can let the client change its quantity inside limits you set. A landscaping quote can carry turf by the square metre with an editable quantity and irrigation as an unticked extra, and the client sees the total change as they choose. The acceptance stores that selection, and the invoices are built from it.

How the columns were checked

Bonsai's column quotes its home page, proposals page, invoicing page, payments page and CRM page as read on 13 October 2026. Prices are deliberately left out and the pricing page is linked instead, so this page does not go stale when a plan changes. Every OneCraft cell names the row of an internal ledger that was read out of the product's source code: the plan caps, the acceptance flow, the invoice rules and the list of things the product does not do.

Who should stay with Bonsai

Stay with Bonsai if hours and expenses drive your invoices, if retainers bill on a schedule from saved cards, if the books sync to Xero or QuickBooks, or if a pipeline and client portal run the relationship. OneCraft replaces the proposal and the invoice that follows it, not the operating system of the business.

Questions people ask