PLYNT for creative and design studios

An identity is quoted as a fixed fee: research, three concepts, two rounds of refinement. The contract is signed and the price stops moving. The work does not. A founder asks to see one more direction. A copy change arrives after the layout is locked. The logo needs a version for an embroidery supplier.

Each of those is small enough to absorb. Together they are the difference between a profitable project and a busy one. Most studios find out at the end, when someone adds up hours by hand — if anyone does.

The fix is not stricter contracts. It is knowing, in the second week rather than the last, that the hours have already passed what the fee covers.

1. The round the project is on. Concept, refinement, delivery — on the project, not reconstructed from a mailbox.
2. Hours against the round, not only the client. An hour that belongs to “two extra concepts” is the hour you renegotiate with.
3. A review step before hours become cost. Recorded time is a claim; approved time is a number you can put in front of a client.
4. Fee, hours and external costs on one screen. Print tests, stock photography, a freelance illustrator, a typeface licence.
5. What was approved, when and by whom. The answer to “but we agreed this in March” should not depend on who still has the email.

A project carries the client and the fee. Tasks carry the round. Time is recorded against a task and reviewed before it counts as cost, so any cost figure can be traced back to the hours that produced it.

External costs — print, licences, a freelancer’s invoice — sit on the same project as expenses, so the margin is the fee minus everything, not the fee minus salaries. The project report shows what the number is built from rather than a single total.

Files stay where designers work. A task links to Figma, Drive or Dropbox; PLYNT holds the decision and the cost, not the artwork.

There is no proofing canvas and no file versioning: PLYNT does not replace Figma or your storage. It is not accounting software and submits nothing to a tax authority. A sales CRM, private desktop time capture and AI analyses are in development and are not part of a plan today.

If most of your work is one-designer, one-invoice jobs, a time tracker and an invoicing tool are cheaper and enough.

How do you price revisions that were never quoted?

You cannot price them after the fact, but you can show them. When extra rounds are their own tasks, the hours against them are a fact rather than a feeling, and the next quote carries a rate for additional rounds.

Is this project management or finance software?

Both, deliberately. The point is that an hour, a fee and an expense refer to the same project. Splitting them across two tools is what makes the end-of-project reckoning manual.

What does it cost for a five-person studio?

$27 a month on Launch, which includes five members; $57 for ten on Core. The price is per workspace, so adding a junior does not change it. Annual billing costs 20% less, and both plans include a 7-day trial. See plans and pricing.

Still choosing between tools? The 2026 comparison guide reads fourteen of them on their own published prices, and the comparison pages go tool by tool.