If you've felt a little less in love with HoneyBook lately, you're not imagining it, and you're definitely not alone.

Since the platform's February 2025 price overhaul, the conversation among photographers, planners, DJs, and florists has shifted from "which CRM should I get" to "is it time to leave the one I have." We looked through Reddit threads, G2 and Trustpilot reviews, HoneyBook's own community forum, and a stack of industry blog posts to understand what's actually driving the switch, and what people are looking for when they go searching for something new.

Here's what we found.

What actually changed

On February 4, 2025, HoneyBook rolled out its biggest pricing update in company history. For monthly billing, the Starter plan jumped from $19 to $36, Essentials went from $39 to $59, and Premium climbed from $79 to $129. That's an increase of roughly 68 to 89 percent depending on the plan, and it was the first price change HoneyBook had made in about a decade.

Existing subscribers got a 20 percent loyalty discount to soften the landing, but that grace period expired on February 4, 2026. Which means if you were grandfathered in, you're likely paying full price right about now.

And the subscription fee is only part of the bill. HoneyBook also charges 2.9% + $0.25 per card transaction, a steeper 3.4% + $0.09 for Amex, Discover, and card-on-file payments, 1.5% flat on ACH transfers, and an extra 1% if you want your payout instantly instead of waiting the standard two to three business days. For a photographer processing $80,000 a year in card payments, that adds up to over $2,300 in processing fees alone, on top of the subscription. Reviewers have pointed out that most pricing pages don't make this add-on cost obvious until you're already deep into a payment flow.

It's not just the price

If pricing were the only complaint, this would be a simpler story. But digging through reviews turned up a pattern of frustrations that go beyond the invoice.

Reliability issues keep showing up. Trustpilot and G2 reviews describe the app loading slowly, email drafts glitching and cutting off content right when you hit send, and contracts or invoices occasionally failing to send to clients entirely. One BBB complaint described a payment marked "paid" inside HoneyBook, with the deposit never actually landing in the business owner's bank account, a problem that reportedly recurred months later.

Customer support has become a sore spot for some. Despite advertising live support seven days a week, at least one user reported no response on a Saturday when they had an urgent banking issue blocking access to funds.

Long-time users feel like the product is drifting from what they signed up for. In HoneyBook's own community forum, a member with several years on the platform raised concerns that new AI features were being bundled into core pricing rather than offered as an optional add-on, and that overall quality had started slipping even as flashy new features rolled out. Another recurring theme: the "Legacy" file format many photographers built their workflows around has been phased out in favor of newer Smart Files, and not everyone's happy about the switch.

The trial window feels short. HoneyBook offers a 7-day free trial. For a tool you're planning to run your entire client pipeline through, several reviewers noted that a week isn't much time to actually stress-test it, especially compared to competitors offering three weeks or more.

None of this means HoneyBook is a bad product. It still holds strong ratings on G2 and Capterra, and plenty of businesses are staying put and getting real value from it. But the combination of a steep price hike, stacked transaction fees, and a string of reliability complaints has been enough to push a meaningful number of users toward the exit.

What people are actually looking for in an alternative

Reading through switching discussions, a pretty clear checklist emerges. If you're evaluating options right now, these are the questions worth asking before you commit to anything new:

What's the real total cost, not just the sticker price? Subscription fee plus payment processing fees plus any per-seat or per-client charges. A cheaper-looking monthly plan can end up costing more once transaction fees are layered on top, so it's worth running your own numbers based on how much you actually process in a year.

Is pricing structured in a way that won't surprise you again? Some businesses are specifically looking for a lifetime or one-time payment option at this point, precisely because they've been burned by a subscription platform raising prices with little warning.

Does the platform actually speak your industry's language? A recurring complaint about generic CRMs is that they're built around "deals" and "opportunities" instead of dates, packages, backdrops, and travel time. If you're a photo booth operator, DJ, or florist, a tool that understands your actual workflow out of the box saves you the work of bending a generic system to fit.

How long is the trial, and does it actually let you test the parts that matter? A short trial makes it hard to know whether contracts, automations, and client-facing pages will hold up once real clients are moving through them.

What does migration actually look like? Moving CRMs means bringing over client records, rebuilding contract and email templates, and retraining yourself (and your team) on a new system. Reviewers specifically call out the lack of support for this kind of transition as a real gap in the market, so if a new platform offers hands-on migration help rather than leaving you to export a CSV and figure it out, that's worth a lot.

Is support actually reachable when something breaks? Not just "how many stars," but whether people report getting real, timely help when a payment or contract issue is actively affecting a client relationship.

The bigger picture

None of this is really about HoneyBook being uniquely flawed. It's what happens whenever a platform a lot of small businesses depend on makes a big pricing move: people start paying closer attention to whether the tool still fits, and whether the market has better options now than it did when they first signed up.

If you're one of the people currently weighing whether to stay or go, you're not being dramatic, and you're not alone. It's a good moment to take stock of what you actually need from a CRM today, not what you settled for years ago.

Currently evaluating your options? We built TalleFlow specifically for event professionals who want the client management basics done right, without the surprise fee stack or the subscription treadmill. If you want to talk through what switching would actually look like for your business, book a time with us.

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