Best Commission Tracker Apps for Artists 2026

The tracker breaks before the queue does

I ran a craft commission business for four years. For the first two of them my tracker was a Google Sheet, a Trello board, a PayPal tab, and a Discord DM folder. It held up fine at four clients. At eleven, I quoted a $340 harness twice at two different prices to the same person, three weeks apart, because the quote lived in a DM and the sheet only had the deposit.

That's the pattern. Nothing fails at five orders. Everything fails somewhere between eight and twenty, and it fails on the money, not the artwork.

So I went back through the tools artists actually use, checked every price and plan limit myself in August 2026, and wrote down where each one cracks.

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Quick verdict

• Free, under 10 orders: Trello. Kanban, free forever, ten boards.
• Free and built for artists: Art Commission Desk. Three concurrent projects with client-facing queue positions.
• Already living in Notion: Notion plus a free marketplace template.
• Selling small digital work to strangers: VGen. You're there for escrow and chargeback protection, not the queue.
• Database people who like building systems: Airtable, and the free tier's 1,000-record cap is real.
• Big-ticket physical builds with materials and multi-month timelines: Costumary Studio.
• Three commissions a year: a spreadsheet. Don't pay for anything.

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1. Trello

Platforms: Web, iOS, Android Price: Free / Standard $6 per user per month ($5 annual) / Premium $12.50 per user per month ($10 annual) / Enterprise $17.50 per user annually Best for: Solo artists under about 10 active orders who think visually

Trello is a kanban board and nothing else, which is why it works. Columns for Inquiry, Quoted, Deposit Paid, In Progress, Awaiting Approval, Shipped, and you see the whole queue without scrolling. The free plan is generous: unlimited cards, unlimited Power-Ups per board, unlimited storage with a 10MB per-file cap, and 250 Workspace command runs per month. The caps that matter are 10 boards and 10 collaborators per Workspace.

What it does well:

Reference images attach to cards, so the client's mood board and the order sit together. Checklists inside a card work as build milestones (pattern cut, mock-up fitted, top-stitched, sealed). I ran a batch of six leather bracers on a Trello board one spring, and the calendar Power-Up saved me twice, because deadlines that live only inside cards are deadlines you don't see.

Where it falls short:

No money. There's no deposit, balance, or invoice concept, so you're running a spreadsheet alongside it anyway. That's how I ended up double-quoting.

Client access is the other trap. Guests are free on Free-plan boards, but single-board guests (the "invite them to exactly one board" setup you'd want per client) is a Standard-only feature, and on paid plans a multi-board guest bills at the same rate as a full member. Observers who are Workspace members or multi-board guests are billable too. So per-client views get expensive on paid plans, and on Free it means adding clients to a Workspace capped at 10 people.

The column structure I used is in the Trello commission workflow walkthrough.

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2. Notion

Platforms: Web, macOS, Windows, iOS, Android Price: Free / Plus $10 per seat per month / Business $20 per seat per month / Enterprise custom Best for: Artists who already run their life in Notion and enjoy building

Notion is a database pretending to be a document, which is the right shape here: one row per order, linked client records, a status select, formula fields for balance owed, and a page of notes behind every row. Free plan specifics worth knowing: uploads cap at 5MB per file (a real problem for reference photos and delivery files), page history is 7 days, and you get 10 external guests.

What it does well:

Formula fields do the math you'd otherwise get wrong at midnight. Quote minus deposit equals balance, rolled up across the queue, is a two-minute build. Most of the good templates are free. Cortado's Art Commission Tracker for Digital Artists costs nothing and ships nine commission stages plus deadline alerts. GloomySundae's Art Commission Workflow 2.5 is also free and adds a timesheet that calculates effective hourly pay, the number most artists avoid looking at. Flygohr's paid Art Commissions Tracker on Gumroad lists at 9.99 EUR, which displayed as $11.58 USD when I checked. It's fine, but it isn't doing anything the free ones don't, so buy it because you like the layout.

Where it falls short:

Nothing happens on its own. Notion won't email a client when status changes, won't chase a deposit, and won't tell you Friday's deadline is Friday. Automations need Zapier or Make bolted on, and now you're maintaining two tools. The 5MB upload cap is what actually pushed me off the free plan, because a client's phone photo of a fabric swatch is often bigger than that.

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3. Airtable

Platforms: Web, iOS, Android Price: Free / Team $24 per seat per month ($20 annual) / Business $54 per seat per month ($45 annual) Best for: People who want a real relational database and will maintain it

Airtable is where you go when linked tables need to behave like linked tables. Orders link to clients, materials link to orders, and a rollup tells you the total cost of goods sitting in your queue. The free tier is tighter than most write-ups admit: 1,000 records per base, 1GB of attachments per base, 2 weeks of revision and snapshot history, and 5 collaborators with Editor or Creator permissions (unlimited read-only, 50 commenters).

What it does well:

Interfaces are the real feature. Build a read-only page from your base and send a client a link showing their order status and nothing else. That's the closest thing to a client portal a general tool will give you. Rollups are why I tried it: knowing my active queue represented $2,180 in committed material spend before I'd been paid a cent changed how I set deposit percentages.

Where it falls short:

The price. $24 per seat per month is more than most commission artists spend on tools in a quarter, and the 1,000-record ceiling arrives fast once every message, milestone, and material is a record. It also eats weekends. I spent two evenings building a base and about forty minutes using it before a busy month sent me back to what I knew. The structure that survives a real queue is in the Airtable commission base guide.

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4. Art Commission Desk

Platforms: Web Price: Free / Starter $9 per month or $90 per year / Pro $15 per month or $150 per year Best for: Digital artists who want commission sheets, intake, and a public queue without building anything

This one is purpose-built and it shows. You publish a commission sheet with prices and options, requests land in an inbox, accepted requests join an ordered queue, and each client gets a read-only board showing their position, which kills a shocking share of "any updates?" messages.

The limits are specific. Free gives 3 concurrent projects, 6 commission sheets, 15 revision rounds per project, 4 images per round, and 1GB of storage. Starter raises that to 10 projects, 15 sheets, 30 rounds, and 10GB. Pro gets 30 projects, 30 sheets, 50 rounds, and 40GB. Annual works out to two months free.

What it does well:

The revision-round counter is the smartest thing on this list. Scope creep in commissions is almost always revision creep, and a tool that counts rounds against a stated limit gives you a number to point at instead of an argument to have. Turnaround times and income trends are built in rather than assembled at tax time.

Where it falls short:

It's shaped around digital illustration. Rounds and image uploads assume you deliver a file. If your commission is a $2,000 fursuit head with a foam base, a fur order, and a resin eye set, "4 images per round" isn't the unit you think in, and there's nowhere to log the $310 you spent at a fabric supplier. No native mobile app either, and 3 concurrent projects on Free is tight if you batch small work.

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5. VGen

Platforms: Web Price: Free to join. 5% service fee plus payment processing on each sale Best for: Digital artists selling to strangers who need payment protection more than project management

VGen is a marketplace with a queue attached, not a tracker with a marketplace attached, and that decides whether it's right for you. You list services, set slot counts, take requests, and get an auto-synced work queue plus waitlists, with upfront or milestone payments through the platform.

What it does well:

Chargeback support and mediation. If you've ever had a PayPal dispute filed four months after delivery, you know no tracker on this list protects you from that, and VGen does. Slots signal capacity without forcing first-come first-served, so you still choose which requests to accept.

Where it falls short:

The 5% plus processing is a real cost. On $12,000 of annual commission income that's $600 before card fees, which buys two and a half years of any subscription here. You're paying for protection and discovery, not software. It's also a closed system: your queue lives on someone else's platform, and it isn't built for physical work with materials and shipping.

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6. Costumary Studio

Platforms: Web (responsive in mobile browsers, no native app) Price: Free (2 active projects) / Base $9 per month / Studio $19 per month Best for: Physical makers whose commissions have materials, budgets, and multi-month timelines

Full disclosure: this is our tool, so weigh my enthusiasm accordingly. What makes it different is that a commission here is a build project first and a transaction second.

Studio adds the commission layer: a public intake form, a request queue, a quote builder with approval gates, a client portal clients use without creating an account, payment tracking, and a pipeline view. Underneath sits the workspace: a reference board, a materials list with per-item status (need, ordered, arrived, owned, tested, used), a budget that adds itself up from those materials, a phase timeline, and a build log.

What it does well:

The budget-from-materials link is what changed my pricing. When every material row carries a cost and the project total updates itself, you stop discovering at delivery that a build ate $180 more in supplies than you quoted. That's the argument in the commission tracking guide, and it holds whether you use us or not.

Approval gates put the quote in writing before work starts, which is exactly the failure that cost me on that harness. Because the client portal needs no login, clients actually use it. Fursuit makers tend to have long queues with big deposits, which is why the fursuit maker workspace leans on payment tracking and a phase timeline rather than a kanban board.

Where it falls short:

Web only. No iOS or Android app, so if you manage your queue from your phone, Trello beats us. No social feed and no marketplace: nobody finds you through Costumary the way they find artists on VGen. No offline mode. And the free tier is 2 active projects, one fewer than Art Commission Desk. To test the idea before paying anyone, the free commission tracker tool runs in the browser without an account.

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How they compare

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What about Google Sheets and paid Etsy templates?

Google Sheets is still the honest answer for a lot of people. Free, works everywhere, and a queue tracker with client, type, quote, deposit, balance, deadline, and status takes about twenty minutes. Add conditional formatting so overdue rows turn red and you have something better than most paid tools at low volume. The Google Sheets commission tracker setup has the formulas. It stops working at the point where you need the tool to tell you something rather than you going to look. Sheets never reminds you, never emails a client, and never notices that a deposit hasn't landed.

Paid templates on Etsy are the upsell that follows. Most are a Google Sheets or Canva file delivered as a PDF with a link, sold as a one-time download. I couldn't load individual listings to confirm current prices (Etsy blocks automated requests), so check before buying, and remember you're paying for someone's column layout, not software. The free Notion templates above do more.

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Which one fits your queue

Digital artist, roughly 20 small commissions a month: Art Commission Desk Starter at $9, or VGen if many of your clients are strangers who found you online. At that volume the revision counter and public queue position matter more than a budget module, because your material cost is a Procreate subscription. Costumary is the wrong shape for you.

Fursuit maker, 8 builds a year at $2,000 each: Costumary Studio at $19. Eight orders is a queue Trello could hold, but $16,000 of revenue against several thousand in fur, foam, and resin is a budget problem, not a card-sorting problem. You need deposits tracked against balances, materials costed per build, and a timeline that runs six months.

Hobbyist, 3 commissions a year: a Google Sheet, or Trello's free plan if you like watching cards move. Pay nothing. At three orders a year every tool on this list is a hobby added to a hobby. Come back when you double-quote someone.

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