You're not paying for one tool. You're paying for twelve.
If you run a design agency with 2-10 people, your operational stack probably looks something like this: a project management app, a messaging tool, a file storage service, an invoicing platform, a client intake form, and a handful of web utilities for things like background removal or QR codes. Each one has its own login, its own subscription, its own logic.
None of them talk to each other.
This is the stack Oase was built to replace. Not by copying each tool feature-for-feature, but by putting the data in one place so work actually flows.
Here's exactly what it replaces, what it costs you today, and what changes when you consolidate.
Project Management
What you're using: Asana, ClickUp, Monday.com, or Trello.
What you're paying: $50-200/month for a 5-10 person team. Per-seat pricing means every hire costs more.
What you're getting: Task boards, timelines, and automations built for every team on earth. Which means nothing is built specifically for how agencies work. Client projects have different rhythms than product sprints. You need phases, revision tracking, and a way to know which projects are healthy without asking your team for status updates.
What Oase does instead: Projects with phases, milestones, and health scores calculated from six real factors — task completion, overdue items, deadline proximity, pending reviews, revision rounds, and recent activity. No more guessing if a project is on track. The number tells you.
Team Communication
What you're using: Slack or Microsoft Teams.
What you're paying: $50-100/month for a 5-10 person team.
What you're getting: A messaging app that lives in a completely separate tab from your projects, files, and client work. Every time someone asks "where did the client say they wanted the blue darker?" you're searching across two tools.
What Oase does instead: A built-in messaging hub with channels, DMs, voice notes, reactions, @mentions, and typing indicators. Project channels are auto-created when you start a project. When a client gives feedback, it's in the same place as the project it belongs to. No more copy-pasting messages between Slack and your PM tool.
Client Intake and Requests
What you're using: Typeform, Google Forms, or email.
What you're paying: $30-100/month for Typeform. Free for email (but the real cost is the time spent reformatting every request into your system).
What you're getting: A form that sends data to your inbox. From there, you manually create a project, copy details into your PM tool, message the client to confirm, and hope nothing got lost in the transfer.
What Oase does instead: A unified request hub where clients can submit a project brief, request a quote from your service catalog, or just message you directly. Incoming requests get AI analysis — scope assessment, clarifying questions, risk flags — before you even respond.
File Storage and Sharing
What you're using: Dropbox, Google Drive, or WeTransfer.
What you're paying: $50-150/month for a 5-10 person team.
What you're getting: Files in one place, projects in another, conversations in a third. "Which version was approved?" becomes a recurring question.
What Oase does instead: File management built into every project. Nested folders, brand kits per client, password-protected share links with expiry dates, and files attached to the conversations where they were discussed. When a client uploads assets through the request hub, they appear in the project's file folder automatically.
Invoicing
What you're using: QuickBooks, FreshBooks, Wave, or spreadsheets.
What you're paying: $30-50/month.
What you're getting: An invoicing tool that has no idea what you quoted, what you delivered, or whether the project is even done.
What Oase does instead: Create invoices from scratch or directly from accepted quotes. Line items auto-populate from the quote. Send via email, track status (draft, sent, viewed, paid, overdue), and give clients a portal view of their invoices. The connection between "what was quoted" and "what was billed" doesn't break.
Quoting and Proposals
What you're using: Google Docs, PandaDoc, or email threads.
What you're paying: $0-50/month.
What you're getting: Proposals that live outside your project system. When a quote is accepted, you manually create the project, manually set up the scope, and manually link everything together.
What Oase does instead: A service catalog with pricing, templates for winning proposals, and AI analysis that reviews incoming briefs against your service descriptions and past work. When a client accepts a quote, one click creates the project, the communication channel, the visionboard, and the onboarding tasks. Quote to project in seconds, not hours.
Client Portal
What you're using: A shared Notion page, a Google Drive folder, or nothing at all.
What you're paying: $0-50/month — but the real cost is lost clients who feel out of the loop.
What you're getting: A makeshift window into your work that requires clients to learn your internal tools.
What Oase does instead: A dedicated client portal with its own dashboard. Clients check project status, review designs with pin annotations (click exactly where you want changes), approve deliverables, submit requests, view invoices, access brand kits, and use 20 self-service design tools. They'll think you hired a full operations team.
Design Review and Feedback
What you're using: Email, Slack, or markup on PDFs.
What you're paying: $0 in tools, but hours in back-and-forth.
What you're getting: "Can you make the logo a bit more... punchy?" in a Slack DM with no reference point. You email back asking which logo, in which project, on which page.
What Oase does instead: Pin annotations directly on designs. Clients click exactly where they want changes and leave comments. AI summarizes all feedback into key themes, action items, and overall sentiment. Designers know exactly what to prioritize without a 30-minute sync call.
Background Removal, Image Upscaling, and Creative Utilities
What you're using: Remove.bg, Topaz Gigapixel, Canva, miscellaneous web tools.
What you're paying: $70-150/month combined.
What you're getting: Five to ten separate tools for quick creative tasks, each with its own account and billing cycle.
What Oase does instead: 20 built-in tools. Background removal. Image upscaling. AI caption generation. QR codes. Color palette generator. Contrast checker. Link shortener. Watermark tool. Instagram grid planner. PDF toolkit. Favicon generator. Image color picker. Pantone finder. Content calendar. Time tracker. Visionboards. All in one place, available to your team and your clients.
AI That Actually Knows Your Business
What you're using: ChatGPT or Claude in a separate browser tab.
What you're paying: $20-25/month per seat.
What you're getting: An AI that gives generic answers because it has zero context about your projects, clients, or invoices. It can write a nice email, but it can't tell you which projects are stalling or which invoices are overdue.
What Oase does instead: Dune, an AI assistant built into the platform. Dune can see your projects, tasks, clients, quotes, invoices, and team workload. Ask it "which projects need attention?" and it checks real data — not guesses. Ask it to draft an invoice reminder and it pulls the actual invoice details. It understands 11 intent types and can take actions with your confirmation.
The Math
A 5-10 person design agency typically spends $400-1,200/month on this collection of tools.
| Category | Typical Monthly Cost |
|---|---|
| Project management | $50-200 |
| Communication | $50-100 |
| File storage | $50-150 |
| Client intake | $30-100 |
| Invoicing | $30-50 |
| Creative utilities | $70-150 |
| AI tools | $20-50 |
| Total | $300-800 |
Oase starts at free for solo operators. The Pro plan at $60/month covers a team of up to six. The Agency plan at $120/month is unlimited staff.
The subscription savings are straightforward. But the real saving is the context that stops leaking every time your team switches between tools. When your project data, client communication, files, invoices, and AI all live in one place, nothing falls through the cracks.
What Oase Doesn't Replace
We're specific about what Oase is and isn't.
Oase does not replace your design tools. Figma, Adobe, Canva — those stay. Oase manages the work around the design, not the design itself.
Oase is not a CRM. We track client relationships within projects, not sales pipelines.
Oase is not enterprise software. We're built for agencies with 2-20 people. If you have 50+ team members and need advanced financial forecasting, tools like Productive.io or Scoro might be a better fit today.
We'd rather be honest about boundaries than overpromise.
Try It With One Project
You don't need to migrate everything at once. Start with one client project. Run it entirely in Oase — project, communication, files, client portal access. See if the team asks to go back to the old tools.
Most don't.