FreshBooks vs Wave: Fees, Plans, and Fit in 2026

Key Takeaways

• The Starter plan on Wave still costs $0. The Pro plan costs $19 a month or $190 a year per business, and automatic bank import sits on that paid plan.

• The Lite plan on FreshBooks costs $23 a month for 5 billable clients, the Plus plan costs $43 a month for 50, and the Premium plan costs $70 a month with no client cap. The Select plan is quote-based.

• A standard US consumer card is 2.9% + $0.30 on FreshBooks and 2.9% + $0.60 on the Starter plan at Wave. Bank transfer (ACH) is 1% on both, with a $1 minimum on Wave.

• On June 1, 2026, legacy Wave businesses that were not using payments, payroll, or another paid service were moved to the Starter plan, so bank connections and extra users stopped being free.

• Choose Wave when the software line must stay at $0 and a manual bank file is acceptable. Choose FreshBooks when you bill time, need an accountant login, or you will pass five billable clients.

What you are actually choosing

FreshBooks versus Wave is a choice between paid invoicing software that meters how many clients you can bill and a bookkeeping app whose core records are free, with the real cost showing up in card fees and the paid plan. Both are built for a sole practitioner or a very small service firm, not for a warehouse. The search is bottom of the funnel: you already know the names, and you need the limit that will hit you first.

TL;DR: stay on the Starter plan at Wave if you can import the bank file yourself, you do not need a second person in the books, and a higher fixed card fee is cheaper than a subscription. Move to the Plus plan on FreshBooks, or higher, if you track time, send proposals, or you will have more than five billable clients. A fuller picture of invoice tools for firms sits in our invoicing software guide for accounting firms.

The two products did not merge, and neither has been renamed. Wave is still Wave. What changed is which features remain on the free plan. That split matters more than the logo.

Who this is for

This comparison is for a sole practitioner choosing their own file, or for a small bookkeeping firm choosing the file a client will live in. You send invoices, you record expenses, and you want to know what happens when a sixth client appears or when a card payment clears. You are deciding this month, not building a software shortlist for next year.

Red flags: you need stock counts, purchase orders, and a warehouse, which neither product is built around. You take payments in a country outside the United States and Canada, where Wave's published card and bank payments are not offered. You require a published price for the top FreshBooks plan before any sales conversation, because that plan is quote-based.

A firm that is really shopping for a different ledger, not a better invoice, should read FreshBooks alternatives for accounting firms before forcing this pair to do a job they do not advertise.

How we evaluated these tools

The weights below follow the decisions this reader actually makes. Price of the plan you will still be on in month four is 20%, because introductory rates expire. The client ceiling is 15%, because the cheap FreshBooks plan stops at a handful of clients. Card and bank fees are 20%, because on Wave they are often larger than the software bill. Whether bank import and receipt capture stay on the plan you think you bought is 15%. Time tracking, proposals, and late reminders are 15%, because that is why people pay FreshBooks. A login for a bookkeeper or a partner is 10%. Published support hours are 5%, as a tie-break rather than a reason to switch. The markers in the table are published figures, not a lab score. Analysis of who should buy sits under each profile, separate from those figures.

NerdWallet score: 4.7/5 according to NerdWallet (2026), which scores Wave at 3.8 and lists weekday phone support for FreshBooks from 8 a.m. to 7 p.m. ET. That review, updated April 24, 2026, also says FreshBooks connects with more than 100 other apps and that Wave has no inventory tracking. Treat the integration count as NerdWallet's figure. Wave's own pricing page, read for this article, lists third-party integrations on the plan comparison, so the April review and the October pricing page do not describe the same integration story.

Plan limits that change the bill

The first limit is the billable client, not the invoice count. FreshBooks lets you send unlimited invoices, then caps how many clients those invoices can go to. The Lite plan stops at 5. The Plus plan stops at 50. The Premium plan and the Select plan do not cap clients. A bookkeeping firm putting several small clients into one FreshBooks subscription will hit the Lite cap immediately. Archived clients can still matter to how you count, so confirm the count inside the account before you promise a sixth client a login-free invoice from a Lite file.

Wave does not publish a client cap on the Starter plan or the Pro plan. The pricing page says you can create unlimited estimates, invoices, bills, and bookkeeping records on the Starter plan. The constraint is different. Automatic bank import, automatic merging and categorizing, unlimited receipt capture, and admin, editor, and viewer roles are listed with the Pro plan. A payroll manager or a Block Advisors tax pro is listed as available without that subscription. One owner doing the books alone can stay on Starter. The moment a partner or an outside bookkeeper needs an admin or editor seat, the file needs Pro, and Pro is charged per business, not per owner.

Double-entry accounting reports, bank reconciliation, and accountant access on FreshBooks start on the Plus plan, not on Lite. Unlimited time tracking, mileage, estimates, recurring invoices, deposits, and automated late reminders are on every paid plan, including Lite. Proposals, retainers, and e-signatures start on Plus. Project profitability, accounts payable, and custom email templates start on Premium. Removing FreshBooks branding from client email is a Select item. If the only job is "send a bill and record the expense," Lite covers the invoice and still withholds the accountant's reports.

Wave's Pro plan is where the product starts chasing late payers for you. The pricing page says reminders can go out 3, 7, and 14 days after a sent invoice is due, and it ties that row to online payments. Firms comparing reminder tools on their own can use our payment reminder guide for accounting firms. FreshBooks lists automated late payment reminders and scheduled late fees on every plan in the comparison table. That is a real product difference, and it is also why a $0 software line is not a $0 process if nobody is watching the due date.

Pricing checked against the vendor pages

Pricing checked October 10, 2026.

Lite list price: $23/month according to FreshBooks (2026), and that page also lists the Plus plan at $43 a month for 50 billable clients, the Premium plan at $70 a month for unlimited clients, an extra team member at $11 a month, the Advanced Payments add-on at $20 a month, payroll at $40 a month plus $6 a month per user, yearly billing as an extra 10% off, a 30-day money-back guarantee, an introductory Lite price of $1 a month for the first year, and 80% off the Plus and Premium plans for three months shown as $8.60 and $14. Use $23, $43, and $70 in any budget that lasts past the offer. The Select plan says "Let's Talk" and does not publish a dollar amount, so it is quote-based.

Pro list price: $19/month according to Wave (2026), where the Starter plan costs $0, the Pro plan is also listed at $190 a year per business, Starter card fees are 2.9% + $0.60 and American Express is 3.4% + $0.60, the Pro plan waives that fixed fee on the first 10 card transactions in a month, late reminders are listed at 3, 7, and 14 days on the Pro plan, live chat and email run Monday to Friday from 9 a.m. to 4:45 p.m. Eastern, receipt capture is listed at $8 a month or $72 a year and at $11 a month or $96 a year, payroll is listed from $25 a month and from $40 a month, Wave Advisors is listed starting at $149 a month and starting at $199 a month, bank connections are described as running through Plaid and not guaranteed for every bank, and the page says customers who turn on invoice payments mark invoices paid 3x faster. The same page still shows a $9.50 Pro rate for three months, and its own terms limit that offer to December 2, 2025 through January 6, 2026, so a buyer on this research date should budget $19.

The two receipt prices and the two payroll "from" prices are both printed on Wave's comparison. The page does not label which column is US dollars and which is Canadian dollars on those add-on rows. Do not collapse them into one number. FreshBooks payroll at $40 plus $6 is explicitly on the FreshBooks pricing page.

A year of list-price software, before payment fees, is the monthly figure times 12 if you ignore the yearly discount FreshBooks labels as an extra 10% off. That is $276 for the Lite plan, $516 for the Plus plan, and $840 for the Premium plan, using only the monthly list. Wave's published annual Pro price is $190, which is $38 less than $19 times 12. Those yearly FreshBooks dollar totals are arithmetic from the monthly list, not a second price list. If you pay FreshBooks yearly, re-check the discounted checkout rather than assuming the 10% label equals a specific invoice.

Fee arithmetic on a paid invoice

Standard card fee: 2.9% + $0.30 according to FreshBooks (2026), where commercial, corporate, business, and American Express cards are 3.5% + $0.30, managed payments such as AutoPay, AutoCollect, and the virtual terminal are also 3.5% + $0.30, ACH is 1% with caps available on the Select plan, Affirm and Afterpay are each 6% + $0.30, a dispute is $15, a failed ACH is $4, an international card adds 1.5%, and an instant payout adds 1.5%. Fees are not returned when you refund the client.

Bank payments on Wave are 1% with a $1 minimum on both the Starter plan and the Pro plan, US card payouts take 2 business days, US bank payouts take 2 to 7 business days, and a payment after 8:00 p.m. Eastern starts the next business day, according to Wave (2026). Discover is US-only. Visa, Mastercard, American Express, and bank payments are listed for the United States and Canada. The Pro discount does not change ACH. It only drops the fixed card portion to $0 for the first 10 transactions that month, then the $0.60 returns.

The dollar cells are arithmetic from the published rates above, not a fee schedule either vendor printed as a total. On a $500 invoice, 2.9% is $14.50. Adding $0.60 makes $15.10. Adding $0.30 makes $14.80. ACH at 1% is $5, which is above Wave's $1 minimum, so the minimum does not change these four rows. The card gap is $0.30 per standard transaction. It becomes serious only when you multiply it by a busy month, or when many of the cards are American Express or commercial cards, where FreshBooks moves to 3.5% + $0.30 and Wave's American Express rate is 3.4% + $0.60.

Here is an illustrative month, not a receipt from either company. A sole practitioner has 12 billable clients and sends 40 invoices at $500, each paid with a standard US consumer card. The Lite plan on FreshBooks stops at 5 billable clients, so the matching published plan is the Plus plan at $43 a month. Card math uses the published rates: 2.9% of $500 is $14.50, the fixed fee on FreshBooks adds $0.30 for $14.80 an invoice, and 40 invoices come to $592. The fixed fee on the Starter plan at Wave adds $0.60 for $15.10 an invoice, and 40 invoices come to $604. The card gap is $12 that month, or $144 across 12 months, while 12 months of the Plus plan is $516 and 12 months of the Pro plan at Wave is $228. Staying on the Starter plan keeps software at $0, so the extra card cost versus FreshBooks is that $144, set against $516 of subscription. The invoice.create event is the moment a reviewer can still stop a sixth client's bill from going out on a 5-client plan. Assume the manual bank file on the Starter plan takes 3 hours that month. That 3 hours is an assumption for the illustration, not a published timing study.

Approval to take payments on Wave is not automatic. The pricing page says online payments depend on eligibility, identity checks, and a credit review. Budget a week of "invoices go out, the pay button is not on yet" if you are switching a client who needs card payments on day one. FreshBooks similarly requires its payments setup before the rate card applies, and users who were moved over from an older Stripe arrangement may keep older rates until FreshBooks tells them otherwise, which is stated on the fee article.

FreshBooks, for firms that bill time

Best fit: a freelancer or a tiny service firm that invoices from a timer, wants the client to see estimates and a portal, and will either stay under 50 billable clients or pay for unlimited. It is also the better fit when an outside accountant must log in without you exporting a file every month, because accountant access is on the Plus plan and above. NerdWallet's April 2026 comparison points to the same split: time tracking and client communication on one side, a lower software bill on the other.

Limitations are the cap and the reports you do not get on Lite. Five billable clients is a ceiling, not a suggestion. Lite also omits double-entry accounting reports, bank reconciliation, and accountant access. You can still track unlimited time and expenses and import the bank on Lite, according to the feature grid on the pricing page. You cannot treat Lite as a full ledger handoff to a bookkeeper. Project profitability waits for the Premium plan at $70 a month. If you only needed that one report, you are paying the top published tier for it. The Select plan adds two team member accounts, dedicated phone support, and included Advanced Payments, but you cannot put it in a spreadsheet until someone quotes it.

Implementation is a cloud signup. The pricing page offers a trial path and a 30-day money-back guarantee beside the current promotions. Do not build a 12-month forecast on the $1 Lite offer or the three-month 80% discount. Those are printed as introductions, with the prior prices of $23, $43, and $70 shown next to them. Turning on a team member is $11 each, every month, on top of the plan. Two staff plus the owner on the Plus plan is $43 plus $22, or $65, before payroll. Payroll is another $40 plus $6 a person, so a firm that thinks the subscription is the whole cost will mis-quote a client.

Primary evidence is the pricing page for plan limits and add-ons, and the FreshBooks Payments fee article for the rate card. The webhook documentation is the right evidence if a firm wants software to notice a new invoice: events are named as a noun and a verb, and invoice.create is one of them, posted only after the callback is verified. That is a product fact about the API, not a claim that any firm has it running.

Who should not choose it: anyone whose honest client count is over five and whose budget was the Lite price. Anyone who wants the ledger software itself to cost $0. Anyone who needs a quote in writing for the Select plan before they will switch. A firm that has already outgrown both the client cap and the light inventory tools should compare other ledgers rather than stretching Premium.

Wave, for firms that can live with a manual bank file

Best fit: a sole owner in the United States or Canada with straightforward invoices, no need for a second admin in the file, and a preference for a $0 software line. Unlimited invoices on the free plan are real. Reports, including the profit and loss the pricing page points to, are on the Starter plan. If you are willing to download a bank file and upload it, the daily books still exist without Pro.

Legacy cutoff: June 1, 2026 according to Kantivo (2026), which describes the free plan as double-entry bookkeeping with unlimited invoices and says automatic bank feeds, a second person on the books, and receipt capture moved to the Pro plan at $19 a month or $190 a year for one business profile. Wave's own legacy-plan help article, read in this session, sets the same June 1, 2026 migration for older businesses that were not using payments, payroll, or another paid service, and it says those businesses keep manual bank-statement upload, invoicing, reconciliation, and reports. Kantivo is a competing product, so the date was checked against that help article rather than taken from the competitor alone. Receipt capture is slightly narrower than "Pro only": Wave's pricing page still sells it as an add-on at the $8 or $11 prices above, and includes it on Pro.

Limitations follow from that split. There is no published time tracker or project-profitability report on the pricing page. NerdWallet says Wave has no mileage tracking and no client portal. Late reminders want the Pro plan and online payments. Collaborators with admin, editor, or viewer rights want Pro. A second business that also needs Pro is a second $19, because the fee is per business. The pricing page uses three businesses at $19 each as its own example. Payments are an application, not a switch. Human support on the pricing page is chat and email in that 9 a.m. to 4:45 p.m. Eastern window, and on the Starter plan it is tied to having an optional add-on. If you pay nothing at all, do not expect a person on the phone.

Implementation risk is the bank connection. Auto-import is a Pro feature and depends on whether Plaid can see the bank. A firm onboarding several clients should assume at least one institution will fail and will need a manual file. Our bookkeeping onboarding guide covers that handoff as its own problem. Moving a client off a legacy free setup after June 1, 2026 is not a settings tweak. It is a decision to pay $19 per business or to accept the manual import and the loss of extra users.

Who should choose it: the owner who invoices, categorizes, and does not need a timer. Who should leave: a firm billing many clients by the hour, a partnership that needs two people in the file every week, and anyone whose card volume makes $0.30 extra per payment larger than the FreshBooks subscription they were trying to avoid. In the illustrative month above, 40 standard card payments cost $12 more on Wave's Starter rate than on FreshBooks. That is cheap next to $43 of software. Four hundred payments would make the fixed-fee gap $120 in a single month, which is no longer a rounding error. Run your own count. Do not borrow a stranger's.

Wave Advisors, starting at the $149 and $199 figures the pricing page prints side by side, is a different purchase. It is a bookkeeping service with Pro features, not a third software tier with a full public rate card. If you want software only, ignore that block. If you want someone else to close the month, ask them for the package price rather than assuming $149 is the invoice you will get.

The chase after the invoice is sent

The ledger is not the hard part for a lot of small firms. The hard part is noticing that an invoice exists, that it is late, and that the plan underneath it is about to reject the next client. FreshBooks will send its own late reminders on every paid plan. Wave will send them on the Pro plan at 3, 7, and 14 days if payments are on. Neither reminder knows that a bookkeeping firm is also watching a stack of client files and a client cap.

A proposed configuration from US Tech Automations starts when FreshBooks emits invoice.create. The prerequisite is an authorized API connection, the invoice read scope, and a verified webhook callback. FreshBooks will not notify an unverified address, and it retries failed callbacks only for a while before it drops them. The action is to put the invoice on a review list with the client name, the amount, and a running count of billable clients against the plan the firm bought. The output is an approved reminder or a hold. A person sends or cancels it. This is a configurable design, not a live deployment, and it has no measured result.

A proposed US Tech Automations design for a Wave file uses a different prerequisite, because this article does not treat Wave as offering that same webhook. The firm downloads a CSV or a payments report it is allowed to export. The trigger is an invoice still open after the due date. The action is to draft one reminder with the open balance attached. The output is a log a person checks before any email leaves. If the export fails or the balance does not match the invoice, the item stays in the queue instead of going to the client. The same human check belongs on a FreshBooks file when the billable-client count is within one of the cap.

Firms often build that queue in Zapier, Make, or n8n, or they have someone on staff write it. Those tools can keep a run history, retry a failed call, branch when a step errors, and store an audit trail, provided somebody sets that up. The buyer then owns the watching, the idempotency so one invoice is not chased twice, the escalation path, who can open client records, and the repair when a field name changes. What a US Tech Automations configuration would set up differently is the client-cap check and the approval sitting in front of the send, still requiring the API connection or the export, and still leaving a person responsible for the message that goes to the client. The books remain in FreshBooks or in Wave. The extra layer only handles the review.

When NOT to use US Tech Automations: keep the invoicing app alone if one bookkeeper already sends reminders from FreshBooks or from the Pro plan on Wave and nobody else needs a queue. Skip an extra layer if you will not connect an API and you will not upload an export, because nothing can fire. Skip it when a missed payment is a phone call you were going to make that afternoon anyway. In those cases the simpler tool is the whole system, and adding a second product only creates a log you will not read.

Mistakes that make the cheap plan expensive

Treating the introductory price as the price. The Lite plan showing $1 a month for a year, and the Plus and Premium plans showing $8.60 and $14 for three months, are offers printed next to $23, $43, and $70. A client proposal that quotes $1 will be wrong in month 13. The Wave page's $9.50 figure is tied to terms that ended January 6, 2026. Quote $19.

Buying the Lite plan for a client list you already know is longer than five. The upgrade path exists, but the month you exceed the cap is a bad time to discover that accountant access was never on that plan either. If you already have 12 billable clients, the honest FreshBooks starting point is the Plus plan at $43, not the Lite plan at $23.

Calling Wave free after you need the bank feed. Since June 1, 2026, the free plan is the manual plan for migrated legacy files. Auto-import is a Pro feature at $19 per business. A firm with ten client businesses that all want the feed is looking at ten subscriptions, which the pricing page's own three-business example already implies. Ten times $19 is $190 a month, the same as one business on the Premium plan at FreshBooks, with a completely different feature set. Do that multiplication before you tell a partner "Wave is free."

Ignoring the fixed card fee because both brands say 2.9%. The gap is $0.30 versus $0.60 on a standard card, and it is a different rate entirely on American Express, commercial cards, and buy-now-pay-later. A firm that passes card fees through to clients should also know both vendors restrict surcharging. Wave's help center says it does not offer a surcharge feature and does not permit it. FreshBooks's fee article says adding the fee onto the client can break country and state rules, and that FreshBooks does not give you a surcharge switch either.

Assuming the Select plan can be compared on price. It cannot, until you have a quote. Comparing "unlimited clients" on the Premium plan at $70 with a quote-based plan that includes two staff seats is incomplete. Put Quote-based in the cell and stop.

Forgetting payout timing when you promise a client their money. A US card payment on Wave is listed at 2 business days, and ACH at 2 to 7. A payment at 8:30 p.m. Eastern waits until the next business day to start. "The client paid" and "the cash is in the operating account" are different days. Reconcile to the payout, not to the invoice stamp.

Short glossary

Billable client: on FreshBooks, a client you can send an invoice to. The Lite plan allows 5 and the Plus plan allows 50. This is not the same thing as an unlimited invoice count.

ACH: a bank transfer. Both vendors publish a 1% fee. Wave adds a $1 minimum. FreshBooks says caps exist on the Select plan and does not publish the cap amount on the fee page.

Fixed fee: the cents added on top of the percent. $0.30 on a standard FreshBooks card payment, $0.60 on a Starter card payment at Wave, $0 on the first 10 Pro card payments in a month at Wave.

Managed payments: FreshBooks's name for AutoPay, AutoCollect, and the virtual terminal. Those flows are priced at 3.5% + $0.30, not at the standard 2.9% + $0.30.

Retainer: a FreshBooks Plus, Premium, and Select feature for holding client funds against future invoices. It is not listed as a Wave plan item on the pricing page.

Dispute fee: $15 on FreshBooks Payments, charged per dispute, separate from the original processing fee, which is not refunded.

Per-business subscription: Wave's rule that the Pro plan is bought for each business profile. Three businesses that all need Pro are three bills of $19.

Questions bookkeepers ask before they switch

Is Wave still free in 2026?

Yes. The Starter plan costs $0 and still includes unlimited invoices and bookkeeping records. Automatic bank import, and admin, editor, and viewer access, are on the Pro plan at $19 a month. Legacy businesses that were not paying for anything were moved to that Starter arrangement on June 1, 2026.

Which FreshBooks plan do you need past five clients?

The Plus plan. It costs $43 a month and raises the cap to 50 billable clients. It is also the first plan with double-entry accounting reports, bank reconciliation, and accountant access. The Premium plan, at $70 a month, removes the client cap and adds project profitability.

Which card fee is lower on a standard Visa?

FreshBooks is lower by $0.30 on a standard consumer card, at 2.9% + $0.30 against 2.9% + $0.60 on the Starter plan at Wave. ACH is 1% on both. American Express is 3.5% + $0.30 on FreshBooks and 3.4% + $0.60 on Wave, so the winner can flip if the card mix is mostly Amex and the invoices are large.

Can a bookkeeper get a login?

On FreshBooks, accountant access starts on the Plus plan. On Wave, admin, editor, and viewer roles require the Pro plan for that business. A Block Advisors tax pro is listed on Wave's pricing page without the Pro subscription. A free Starter file is a one-person file if you need a true second user.

Is payroll included in either subscription?

No. Payroll on FreshBooks costs $40 a month plus $6 a month per user, on top of the plan. Wave's pricing page lists payroll from $25 a month and from $40 a month on the same grid and does not label the currency on that row. Get a payroll quote for the states you actually run before you call either suite "all in."

When do both products stop being enough?

When you need inventory depth, departmental accounting, or a quote-based enterprise close, neither published plan is the destination. NerdWallet describes FreshBooks inventory as basic and Wave as having none. A service firm billing time can stay. A product business that is counting units should look at a fuller ledger and use this pair only for the invoicing lesson, not as the system of record.

Which one to pick, then what sits above it

Choose the Starter plan at Wave if you are one person, your clients are in the United States or Canada, you can upload a bank file, and the $0 software line matters more than timers and proposals. Choose the Pro plan at Wave, at $19 a month per business, if the missing piece is the bank feed, receipt capture, or a second person, and you still do not bill from a timer. Choose the Plus plan on FreshBooks, at $43 a month, if you already have more than five billable clients or you need an accountant in the file. Choose the Premium plan, at $70 a month, if the client list is open-ended or you need project profitability. Leave the Select plan as quote-based until a number is in writing. Leave both if the work is inventory-heavy.

The subscription is the part you can look up. The operating risk is a reminder that fires twice, a sixth client billed on a five-client plan, or a payout booked as if it were the gross invoice. For a firm that wants that review step configured on top of whichever ledger it keeps, see how US Tech Automations configures this. The books stay where they are. The check before anything reaches the client is the part worth designing on purpose.