Everything We Have Costed
Disclosure: Wise approved our application on 27 August 2026 and one marked link on this site now pays us, at the end of the Wise comparison. SimplyBook.me is unapproved, FreshBooks declined ours on 31 August 2026, Square declined ours twice, and none of them has paid us anything. Full disclosure.
Over two weeks we opened fourteen pricing pages, read them in the currency they were actually written in, and did the arithmetic instead of quoting the headline. This page is the short version: what everything costs, which free plans are real, and the six findings that turned out to matter more than any product choice.
The six findings
If you read nothing else
How you are paid matters about ten times more than which software you use.
- 📈The same $1,000 invoice costs $5.00 to $58.30 to receive. At $25,000 the spread is 290×. All twenty routes.
- 🏦Every route under 1% is a bank transfer. Every route over 2.6% is a card. There is nothing in between.
- 💰Six free plans are genuinely free — Zoho Invoice, Invoice Ninja, Wave, Square Invoices, Cal.com, Setmore. None is a trial.
- ⚠️The advertised price is often not the price. FreshBooks shows 90% off for three months; month four costs ten times month three.
- 🔑Two fees are self-inflicted: Stripe Invoicing’s 0.4% and PayPal’s own button. Both are avoidable in a single setting.
- 🌎An overseas client costs 4.4–5.8%, and the bank-transfer escape does not cross a border. The full breakdown.
Invoicing: what every tool costs
| Tool | Free plan? | Cheapest paid | The catch |
|---|---|---|---|
| Zoho Invoice | Yes, 0% of payments | — | Annual invoice cap, number unpublished |
| Invoice Ninja | Yes, 5 clients | $140/yr | Its name on your invoice; reminders are paid |
| Wave | Yes, with bookkeeping | $190/yr | 2.9% + 60¢ on cards; US/Canada only |
| Square Invoices | Yes, unlimited | $588/yr | 3.3% + 30¢ online — highest of the four |
| Stripe Invoicing | No — 0.4% per invoice | — | Stacks on 2.9% + 30¢ |
| PayPal Invoicing | Yes, no monthly fee | — | Its own button costs 0.5% more than a card |
| FreshBooks | No — 30-day trial | $276/yr | Metered on clients; your 6th costs $240/yr |
Start here: Best invoicing software for a business of one · Four FreshBooks alternatives that cost nothing · Zoho vs Invoice Ninja · Wave vs Zoho · FreshBooks vs Wave · Square vs Wave
Scheduling: what every tool costs
| Tool | Free plan? | Cheapest paid | The catch |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cal.com | Yes — unlimited event types | $144/yr | Branding removal is a team tier |
| Setmore | Yes — deposits included | $60/yr | No calendar sync on free; 200/month |
| Square Appointments | Yes — no volume cap | $588/yr | Cannot charge a no-show without paying |
| Calendly | Yes — 1 event type | $120/yr | Payments and a second service are paid |
| SimplyBook.me | Yes — 50 bookings/mo | See breakdown | Currency varies by country |
| Acuity Scheduling | No — 7-day trial | $192/yr | No free plan to land on |
Start here: Best scheduling software for solo practitioners · Three Calendly alternatives that are actually free · Cal.com vs Calendly · Setmore vs Calendly · Acuity vs Calendly · Acuity vs Setmore · Square vs Setmore · SimplyBook vs Square
Getting paid: the part that actually costs money
Start here: What card processing actually costs · Stripe vs PayPal · What an overseas client costs you
How this was done, and where it is weak
Every figure on this site was read from the vendor’s own pricing page, in the browser, on a stated date, and then recomputed independently before publication. Where a vendor would not publish a number we say so rather than repeating what other comparison sites claim. Three of those gaps are worth naming here:
Country. Everything is the United States version. Stripe redirected us to a Japanese page on the first attempt, where the domestic card rate is an entirely different number; Zoho Bookings would only show us yen, so we did not publish it at all. None of these figures is portable. Open your own country’s page.
Wise and Payoneer — now costed. This was the largest hole on the site and it is closed: receiving $3,000 from abroad costs $13.74 through Wise against $135–$174 on a card. It took a fourth attempt to read Wise’s US pages, which is why the earlier articles said we could not. One gap remains: Payoneer’s conversion fee would not open for us.
Unpublished numbers. Zoho’s annual invoice cap, Invoice Ninja’s white-label licence price, PayPal’s currency-conversion spread and Fresha’s marketplace rate are all real costs that their owners do not publish. We have said so in each article rather than filling the gap with a guess.
Disclosure: Wise approved our affiliate application on 27 August 2026, and one marked link on this site now pays us, at the end of the Wise comparison. Wise has not paid us anything yet. We still hold one unapproved application, with SimplyBook.me. FreshBooks — which would have paid up to $200 per subscriber, the largest sum available to this site — declined ours on 31 August 2026, and Square declined ours twice. Every ranking below still puts products that cannot pay us above ones that could; Wise is the single exception, and it is named here rather than left for you to find.
The one thing to do today
If you take one action from thirty-one pages of arithmetic, make it this. Add a line to your next invoice:
“Bank transfer details below — card payment link if that is easier.”
On $1,000 that sentence is worth $20–$25. On $5,000, $160. On $25,000, $1,445. It costs nothing to write and asks nothing of the client but a different button.
Everything else on this site — every plan, every comparison, every free tier — is smaller than that.
All thirty-one pages are listed on the home page. Prices change without notice; every article carries the date it was checked. If a figure here is wrong, the vendor’s own page wins — and we would rather you checked it than trusted us.