FreshBooks pricing and plan limits

FreshBooks prices by how many clients you bill, not by users or invoices: Lite at $23 a month for 5 clients, Plus at $43 a month for 50 clients, and Premium at $70 a month with no client limit. Each plan includes one user; anyone else who works in the account is a paid team member. There’s no free plan, and new customers choose a limited-time discount or a 30-day trial, not both.

Which plan should a one to five person business pick?

Start with your client list, then the people.

• A few steady clients, and you only invoice: Lite at $23 a month. It covers estimates, expenses, online payments, and tax-time reports for 5 clients. Archived clients count, so one more client than that means moving up, or deleting an old client who no longer needs their invoice links.
• A rotating client list, or you want real books: Plus at $43 a month, for 50 clients. It adds the accounting reports, receipt scanning, proposals and retainers, and access for your accountant.
• Many clients, or you pay supplier bills through it: Premium at $70 a month, with no client limit. It adds bills and vendors, project profitability, and your own email templates.

Then add the people. Every plan includes one user, and each extra person is billed as an add-on, $11 a month per user. That’s fine for one assistant; for three or four people who all need a login, a tool with no per-user fee may come out lower, which is worth checking on Xero pricing.

Say you’re a solo grant writer. Over a year you write for about a dozen nonprofits, a few of them every year, most once, and you’d rather keep them all on file for the next round.

A dozen clients on file, archived or not, is past Lite’s limit of 5 clients, so it’s Plus at $43 a month, which also gives your accountant a login at tax time. Here is the first year, with the discount and with the trial:

If you’re sure FreshBooks is the tool, the discount is the cheaper year. If you’re comparing, take the trial and pay the regular price from the first billed month.

What moves you up a plan?

Clients, mostly. One client past Lite’s limit of 5 clients or Plus’s limit of 50 clients needs the next plan, unless you delete a client you’ve finished billing. Their invoices stay in your account and you can restore them later, but while they’re deleted they can’t open any invoice you’ve sent them, so that’s a client who’s paid up and won’t come back for a copy. It frees a place; it isn’t routine cleanup.

Features come second. You move from Lite to Plus for accounting reports, receipt scanning, or your accountant’s login, and from Plus to Premium to track the bills you owe suppliers or a project’s profit. Select, for larger businesses, has no published price.

Skip FreshBooks if

• You want to pay nothing. FreshBooks has no free plan. When free invoicing is enough compares the free plans in this guide.
• Several people need to log in. Each one is a team member on top of the plan. Xero lists no per-user fees; see Xero pricing.
• You want the lowest paid bill for one person. For one person, the lowest paid bill in this guide is Wave (Pro) at $19 a month; which tool fits a 1 to 5 person business weighs it against what you give up.
• You pay a lot of supplier bills and want them in the cheapest plan. Bills and vendors are Premium only.

Plans and prices

The client limit is the figure that decides your plan. Yearly billing is lower, but FreshBooks doesn’t publish the regular yearly price, so we don’t show one.

Costs that are easy to miss

• The discount replaces the trial, and it’s for a limited time. The lower prices are bought through Buy Now & Save, which includes no free trial, and FreshBooks says the offer can end at any time. On Lite the discount is worth $73.60, and the trial $23. Plan your budget on the regular price either way.
• Archived clients count. The limit isn’t the clients you’re billing this month; it’s everyone on file who hasn’t been deleted, and deleting has a cost of its own: the client loses access to every invoice link you’ve sent them until you restore them.
• People cost extra on every plan. Team members are billed as an add-on, $11 a month per user. Your accountant joins free on the plans with accounting.
• Some payment features are an add-on. Saving a client’s card and setting up automatic recurring payments is Advanced Payments, priced separately.
• Getting paid online costs a fee per payment. On an invoice of $1,500, a card payment through FreshBooks costs $43.80 and a bank transfer $15, with no cap on the bank-transfer fee below Select. What invoicing costs once customers pay by card works it out at your volume.

Does FreshBooks work in Spanish?

Yes for the app and for what your clients see: you can switch FreshBooks itself to Latin American Spanish, and set any client’s estimates, invoices, and proposals to Spanish. Its pages don’t say whether support is offered in Spanish.

Our view

FreshBooks suits a service business with a small, steady client list that wants invoicing first and books close behind, because Plus puts proposals, retainers, receipt scanning, and an accountant login in one plan. Our position: start on Plus unless you’re sure you’ll stay under Lite’s client limit, take the discount if you’ve decided, and if you’re near the limit, budget for the next plan rather than counting on deleting clients to stay under it. What you give up is cost at the edges: no free plan, a charge for every extra person, and supplier bills only on Premium. A one-person business that only needs to invoice can do it for less.

Your next step

Count every client you billed in the last twelve months, including the ones you’d archive. If it’s within Lite’s limit and you only invoice, start on Lite; otherwise start on Plus. Then choose: the discount if you’ve decided, the 30-day trial if you’re comparing. See FreshBooks’ plans.