In brief: Net Net is workflow management software for small creative and technical firms, where work moves through five stages: Job, Deliverables, Tasks, Time, Performance.

Applies to: Everyone in the workspace, on the free tier, an active trial, or a paid plan.

See also: Creating Your Net Net Workspace: The Three Setup Steps covers standing up a new team, and Joining an Existing Workspace: Invites and Join Requests covers arriving in one someone else already built.

Net Net is workflow management software for small creative and technical firms. It holds your real work in one place, one Job at a time, and shows you how that work is actually going while there is still time to do something about it. This article is the mental model: what Net Net is, the path a piece of work takes through it, a tour of the areas you will use, and the right next step depending on whether you are setting up a workspace or joining one that already exists.

Read this one first. Everything else in the help center assumes it.

What Net Net actually is

Most shops your size run on a stack that works fine, piece by piece. A task board. A time tracker. A spreadsheet someone updates on Fridays. A Slack thread where the real decisions happen.

Each tool is fine. The problem is that none of them talk to each other, so the answer to "how is that job actually going?" only exists in someone's head, and usually only after the job is finished.

Net Net closes that gap. You plan a piece of work, your team does it, and the effort they log flows straight back into the plan. No reconciling, no Friday spreadsheet, no waiting until the invoice to find out what it really took.

The longer version of that argument, including what it looks like when planning, delivery, tracking, and learning all sit in one system, is on the Net Net workflow management software page.

Effort is the unit

Net Net speaks in effort, measured in hours, and in days. Not in dollars, not in points, not in percentages of a bar someone dragged.

That is deliberate. Effort is the language you already speak when you are talking to your team about the work. Rates and revenue exist elsewhere in Net Net, but the parts you look at every day speak hours and days, because that is what you can actually act on.

Drift and Flow

Work rarely fails suddenly. It drifts. Effort creeps ahead of the calendar, a date slides, a scope grows by one small favor at a time, and by the time anyone says it out loud the good options are gone.

Flow is the opposite. Flow is what happens when you see the shift early and make a calm, deliberate adjustment while adjusting is still cheap.

Everything in Net Net's Performance layer is built around that one idea. It is not there to alarm you. It is there to show you the pattern early enough that you get to decide what it means.

What Net Net is not

It is not billed per person. Net Net charges by active Job, never by seat. Invite your staff, your part-timers, your freelancers, and the coordinator who shows up on Tuesdays. The price does not move. When every login has a price, someone gets left out, and the person who gets left out is usually the one whose effort you most needed to see.

It is not a task tracker with more fields. A flat list of to-dos will not tell you anything about how a job went. In Net Net, tasks sit inside Deliverables, and Deliverables are what performance is measured on. The structure is what makes the answers possible.

It is not a CRM. Contacts hold your companies and people. Net Net points at them, it does not manage the relationship.

The path work takes

This is the shape of the whole product. Once this clicks, the rest is detail.

Job → Deliverables → Tasks → Time → Performance

Job. The container for one real piece of work, either a Project (finite, with a Timeline) or a Retainer (ongoing, running in monthly cycles). Everything Net Net reports on rolls up through Jobs. See Projects vs Retainers: Choosing the Right Job Type.

Deliverables. The major promises inside the Job. Discovery, Design, Build, Launch. Each one carries an effort budget per service type, so 40 hours of Design and 60 hours of Development stay visible as two separate numbers instead of collapsing into one meaningless total. This is where performance is measured. See Deliverables: Status, Due Dates, and Confidence Explained.

Tasks. The real activities that produce a Deliverable. One task is one thing that actually happens, with one due date and as many people on it as it took. See Job Tasks: Assignees, Allocations, and Statuses.

Time. Your team logs effort against those tasks, with a timer or by hand. This is the input layer for everything above it. See My Time: Log Your Effort and Fix What You Missed.

Performance. Logged effort meets the plan, and you get to see how the work is going while it is still going. See Reading the Job Performance Tab: Plan, Actual, Drift.

What will sit in front of a Job, later this year

Sales is coming to Net Net in Q3 2026, and it will add one step to the front of that chain: the Opportunity, a real piece of work that might happen but is not defined well enough to plan against yet.

It is not in the app today. Until it ships, potential work belongs in My Lists or wherever you keep it now, and it enters Net Net properly when it is solid enough to plan as a Job. The full preview of how Opportunities will work is in Sales Opportunities, Not a CRM: A Q3 2026 Preview.

A tour of the app

Down the left of your workspace you will find these.

Me

Your own four surfaces, and where most people spend most of their day.

• My Tasks is every task assigned to you in one flat list, whether it lives inside a Job or stands alone. It is also where you land after logging in.
• My Lists is your private capture space. Nobody can see it, not even an Owner. Ideas go here before they are real work.
• My Time is your own record of logged effort, and the place to add time you forgot at the time.
• My Performance is your personal mirror. No rankings, no scorecards, no leaderboard.

Jobs

Where the work lives. Planning, Deliverables, tasks, the Timeline on Projects, cycles on Retainers, and the Performance tab. Start at Projects vs Retainers: Choosing the Right Job Type, then Plan Stepper: How to Build a Job Plan Step by Step.

Quick Tasks

Real commitments with a real owner that are not attached to a Job. The favor for a client, the internal errand, the thing that has to happen Thursday. See Creating Quick Tasks: Fields, Statuses, and Filters.

Contacts

Your companies and the people at them. Jobs point here for the client. See Companies, People, and Individuals: Contact Records.

Chat

Conversation that stays attached to the work. Job channels, Deliverable and task threads, direct messages, and mentions that link a message to a real Job, Deliverable, or task. See Chat Layout: Stream, General, Job Channels, and DMs. Chat requires an active trial or a paid plan.

Performance

The reports that pull across every Job: Time, Team, and Jobs. Single-Job performance lives on the Job itself.

Settings

The structural layer: your Team, your Service Types and Service Groups, your Deliverable Types, your workspace details, and your subscription. Owners and Admins only.

Your profile

Your name, your photo, your password. These belong to you rather than to the workspace, which is why no admin can change them. See Managing Your Personal Profile: Name, Photo, Password.

Your own AI

Net Net runs an MCP server, so you can connect the AI assistant you already use and ask it questions against your own workspace data. Setup happens inside your AI tool, not inside Net Net, and it takes a few minutes. See Connect Your Own AI to Net Net with the MCP Server.

Where to go next

If you are setting up the workspace

You are the Owner. Your path:

1. Creating Your Net Net Workspace: The Three Setup Steps. Name it, claim its URL, pick your industry.
2. Service Types and Service Groups: What Each One Does. The categories of work your shop actually sells. Everything downstream speaks in these, so this is the one setup step worth thinking about.
3. Managing Team Members, Invites, and Join Requests. Invite everyone. It costs nothing.
4. Plan Stepper: How to Build a Job Plan Step by Step. Build your first real Job.
5. Activating a Job: What Happens When the Plan Locks. Read this before you activate, not after. Activation is a one-way door, and it is also what starts your trial.

If you are joining a workspace someone else built

Your path is much shorter, because the structure is already there.

1. Joining an Existing Workspace: Invites and Join Requests. Getting in, whether you were invited or asked to join.
2. Managing Your Personal Profile: Name, Photo, Password. Your name and photo, so your teammates know who is who.
3. My Tasks: Every Task Assigned to You, in One List. Where your work shows up.
4. My Time: Log Your Effort and Fix What You Missed. How to log effort, and how to add the entry you forgot on Tuesday.
5. User Roles Explained: Owner, Admin, Lead, and Member. What you can and cannot do here.

If you are just trying to decode a word

The Net Net Vocabulary defines every term in the product in a couple of sentences each, with a link to the article that goes deeper.

What it costs to try this

Signing up gives you a free tier that never expires and never asks for a card. On it you get your workspace, Contacts, Quick Tasks, My Lists, and the ability to build Job plans.

Activating your first Job starts a 60-day trial with everything unlocked. Setup time does not burn trial days, because the clock does not start until you switch a Job on.

Nothing converts on its own. If you do not choose a paid plan before the trial ends, the workspace returns to the free tier and all of your data stays exactly where it is. Full details in Net Net Pricing: Free Tier, 60-Day Trial, and Paid Plans.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Net Net?

Net Net is workflow management software for small creative and technical firms. It holds planning, tasks, logged effort, conversation, and performance for a piece of work in one place, so you can see how a job is going while it is still going instead of finding out after it ships.

How does Net Net actually work, end to end?

Work moves through five stages: Job, Deliverables, Tasks, Time, Performance. A Job is the container for work that is happening. Deliverables are the promises inside it, each with an effort budget by service type. Tasks are the real activities. Your team logs time against those tasks, and that effort flows straight into Performance. A sixth stage in front of the Job, the Opportunity, arrives with Sales in Q3 2026.

Does Net Net charge per user?

No. Net Net is priced by active Job, never per seat. You can invite staff, contractors, and freelancers without the price changing, which means the people doing the work are never left outside the system for cost reasons.

Do I have to set everything up before I can try it?

No. Building a Job plan is free and nothing is on a clock during setup. Your 60-day trial starts the first time you activate a Job, so you can take as long as you like getting your service types and your first plan right.

What is the difference between Drift and Flow?

Drift is work going off course quietly, before anyone notices. Flow is catching that shift early and adjusting while adjusting is still cheap. Net Net's Performance layer exists to turn the first into the second by showing you effort and timeline together, as the work happens.

Is Net Net a project management tool?

It overlaps with one, but the shape is different. A project management tool tracks whether tasks are done. Net Net tracks that too, and then connects the effort behind those tasks back to the plan you committed to, which is the part that tells you how the work actually went.

I have used tools like this before. What is the one thing I should not skip?

Setting up your Service Types honestly before you plan your first Job. Every effort budget, every task allocation, every hour logged, and every performance breakdown speaks in Service Types. Get them right and the rest of the product tells you the truth. Get them vague and it tells you very little.

Related articles

Where you go from here depends on how you arrived. If you are standing up a new workspace, Creating Your Net Net Workspace: The Three Setup Steps walks the three setup steps, while anyone who was added to a team that already exists wants Joining an Existing Workspace: Invites and Join Requests instead. Once you are inside and a word on screen stops making sense, The Net Net Vocabulary: Every Term in the Product defines every term in the product in a couple of sentences. For the idea underneath the whole Performance layer, How Performance Works: Effort, Timeline, and Drift explains how logged effort and the calendar get read together, and Job Lifecycle: Pending, Active, Completed, Archived follows a Job from the day you plan it to the day you archive it.

Updated on: 08/04/2026