Consult Fees vs Bonsai: Decide What to Charge Before Bonsai Sends the Invoice

Written by Charlotte Jones | May 14, 2026

Most consultants comparing Consult Fees and Bonsai are asking the wrong question. Bonsai is an operations platform, CRM, time tracking, contracts, invoicing, and proposal templates wrapped into one tool. Consult Fees sits one step earlier: it decides what the engagement is worth, before anyone opens a template. The two tools do not overlap in any serious way. The interesting question is which problem you have right now.

If your problem is that your back-office is fragmented across five tools, Bonsai is the better answer. If your problem is that you stare at a blank proposal template and guess at the fee, this page is for you.

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The Honest One-Line Difference

Bonsai runs the engagement. Consult Fees decides what the engagement is worth.

Bonsai will track your hours, send the contract, generate the invoice, and store the proposal template. None of that helps you answer the only question that matters before a proposal goes out: what should this fee be, and why?

Consult Fees turns a plain-English project description into five business objectives, four value statements per objective with annual monetary impact, three pricing options with scope and value, and three retainer packages, all backed by cited industry sources. You bring those outputs into your Bonsai proposal, your own document, or a PDF. Bonsai handles the rest of the workflow.

When Bonsai Is the Right Tool

Be honest about where Bonsai wins. If any of these describe you, Bonsai is a credible choice on its own:

You bill hourly and want time tracking that flows directly into invoices.
You need contracts, e-signatures, and recurring billing in one place.
You run a small agency or service business with mixed work types, consulting, design, marketing, IT, and want a single CRM.
You want a template library with consulting-specific contract and proposal shells already drafted.
You already pay for QuickBooks or Xero and want a tool that integrates cleanly.

Bonsai serves more than 10,000 firms because that operations layer is real and useful. Nothing on this page argues otherwise.

When Consult Fees Is the Right Tool

Consult Fees is the better answer when the fee itself is the friction. Specifically:

You undercharge and you know it, but you cannot defend a higher number without sounding defensive.
You bill hourly today and want to move toward value-based pricing, without rebuilding your back-office.
You stare at blank Bonsai proposal templates and rebuild the pricing logic from scratch every time.
Clients push back on your fees and you have no evidence to hold the line.
You want to turn project work into structured retainers, not just recurring invoices.
You are a solo consultant or 2–5 person firm where per-user pricing math gets uncomfortable fast.

If two or more of those land, the gap is upstream of Bonsai, not inside it.

See Sample Objectives, Pricing Options, and Retainers

Side-by-Side Comparison

Capability	Bonsai	Consult Fees
Generates business objectives from a project brief	✗	✓
Monetized value statements with cited sources	✗	✓
Three tiered pricing options per engagement	✗	✓
Three scoped retainer packages per engagement	✗	✓
20:1 ROI floor applied to pricing logic	✗	✓
Proposal templates and document storage	✓	✗
Contracts and e-signatures	✓	✗
Time tracking	✓	✗
Invoicing, payments, and recurring billing	✓	✗
Built-in CRM and pipeline	✓	✗
Accounting integrations (QuickBooks, Xero)	✓	✗
Anonymous project start, no per-seat math to try	✗	✓
Consultant-specific outputs (not generic service-business)	Partial	✓

Read this table left-to-right and the conclusion writes itself: the tools answer different questions. The right setup for most consultants is to use them in sequence, decide the fee in Consult Fees, document and bill it in Bonsai or whatever you already use.

How the Two Work Together

A typical consulting engagement, end to end:

Discovery call. You hear the client describe the project in their own words.
Consult Fees. You paste the project description into Consult Fees. You get five business objectives, four value statements per objective, three pricing options with scope and value, and three retainer packages. Each value statement is backed by a cited source.
Bonsai (or your tool of choice). You open the consulting proposal template in Bonsai. You drop in the objectives, the three pricing options, and the retainer offer. You sign and send.
Bonsai handles delivery. Contracts, time tracking if you want it for internal margin tracking, invoicing, payments. Everything downstream runs in Bonsai exactly the way it does today.

Consult Fees is the pricing brain. Bonsai is the operating system. Neither replaces the other.

What Consult Fees Outputs (Sample)

Take a project description like: "Help a 60-person SaaS company restructure their go-to-market function around a new mid-market segment over the next four months."

You get back:

Business Objectives (5), each tied to a measurable client outcome. For example: Re-segment the pipeline so mid-market accounts get dedicated motion, increasing mid-market win rate by 15-25%.

Value Statements (4 per objective, ≥2 monetized), for example: At an average mid-market ACV of $80,000 and 20 incremental wins per year, the segmentation work generates $1.6M in net-new annual revenue. Each cited source is linked inline.

Pricing Options (3), sorted high-to-low for anchoring. Each option includes scope, value list, and fee. A 20:1 ROI floor keeps the lowest tier credible.

Retainer Packages (3), three monthly follow-on offers with defined scope, outcomes, and fee. Not "ongoing advisory." Scoped continuity.

That is the entire workflow output. You take it from there.

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Pricing and Seats

Bonsai's published pricing in 2026:

Basic, $15/user/month (no proposals or contracts at this tier)
Essentials, $25/user/month (proposals, contracts, invoicing unlocked)
Premium, $39/user/month (white-label, pipeline, integrations)
Elite, $59/user/month (3-user minimum)

Annual billing drops each tier roughly 30%. A 7-day free trial requires a payment method.

For a 4-person consulting firm on Premium, that is $156 per month at monthly billing, $1,872 per year before any add-ons or transaction fees.

Consult Fees runs differently. Anonymous project creation means you can describe a project, see the full outputs, and decide whether the workflow is worth paying for, before you put in a credit card or pick a seat count. There is no per-seat math at the trial stage.

This is the friction we hear most often from solo consultants and 2–5 person firms evaluating Bonsai: the per-user model compounds quickly, and the features that matter most for pricing, proposals, contracts, sit behind Essentials or higher.

Common Objections, Answered Honestly

"Bonsai already has proposal templates. Why do I need another tool?"

Bonsai gives you a blank proposal template with consulting-specific contract language. It does not generate the business objectives, monetized value, tiered fees, or retainer offers that go inside the template. Consult Fees fills that gap. You still use the Bonsai template.

"I already pay for Bonsai. I am not paying for a second tool."

Fair. Try Consult Fees first without paying. Anonymous project creation, no seats, no card. If the outputs do not change how you price your next engagement, do not subscribe.

"Is this just a fee calculator?"

No. A calculator gives you a number. Consult Fees gives you five business objectives, twenty value statements with sources, three pricing options, and three retainer packages, proposal-ready, in one workflow.

"How do I know the value numbers are credible?"

Each monetized value statement is paired with cited sources. You can read the source before you put the number in front of a client. That is the entire point of the source-backing, it has to survive scrutiny.

"Will my clients see Consult Fees?"

No. The outputs go into your Bonsai proposal, your own document, or a PDF. The client sees a clean, justified fee. Consult Fees is your back-office, not theirs.

"I track time in Bonsai. Will value-based pricing break that workflow?"

No. Bonsai can keep tracking time for internal margin analysis. The client never sees hours, they see objectives and value. You can run both models in parallel.

"Is this built for agencies or consultants?"

Consultants specifically. Independent consultants, fractional leaders, boutique-firm principals. The vocabulary, the outputs, and the workflow assume a consulting engagement, not a creative project or an agency retainer.

"What if the generated objectives do not match my project?"

Edit them. The objectives, value statements, and pricing options are starting points designed to be refined by you. You know the client; Consult Fees knows the structure.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Consult Fees a Bonsai alternative or a complement?

Complement. Bonsai runs operations after the fee is decided. Consult Fees decides the fee. Most consultants who use both keep Bonsai for invoicing, contracts, and time tracking, and add Consult Fees upstream for pricing logic.

Can I paste pricing options from Consult Fees into a Bonsai proposal?

Yes. The outputs are plain text and structured tables. They drop into any Bonsai proposal template, any Google Doc, or any PDF.

Does Consult Fees handle contracts, e-signatures, invoicing, or time tracking?

No. Those workflows live in Bonsai (or Ignition, Proposify, QuickBooks, or whatever stack you use). Consult Fees stops once the pricing logic is set.

How does pricing compare for solo consultants and 2–4 person firms?

Bonsai charges per seat, $25-$39/user/month for the tiers with proposals. A 4-person firm on Premium is $156/month monthly billed. Consult Fees does not require a seat to try; you can run the workflow anonymously and decide later.

Do I need to create an account to try it?

No. Describe a project on the homepage and see the full output. Save by email if you want to come back to it. Account creation is downstream of value, not upstream of it.

How are the monetized value statements generated and sourced?

Each value statement is tied to a business objective and benchmarked against cited industry sources. The source URLs are linked inline so you can verify before bringing the number into a client conversation.

Will switching to value-based pricing break my time-tracking workflow in Bonsai?

No. Keep tracking time in Bonsai for internal margin tracking. Value-based pricing changes what the client sees, not what you measure internally.

Can I use Consult Fees alongside Qwilr, Proposify, PandaDoc, or Ignition?

Yes. Consult Fees is intentionally upstream of any proposal or document tool. The outputs travel with you regardless of which downstream stack you use.

Ready to Decide the Fee Before You Send the Proposal?

If your back-office is the bottleneck, Bonsai is a reasonable answer.

If the bottleneck is the fee itself, the moment you have to write a number into a proposal and defend it, that gap does not close inside any operations platform. It closes upstream, with business objectives, monetized value, tiered options, and retainer structure built before the template opens.

That is what Consult Fees does. You can try the workflow on a real project in under five minutes, with no signup and no credit card.