FreshBooks vs Wave for a Business of One

Direct comparison · Prices last checked 14 August 2026 · Both linked to source

Disclosure: Some links on this page are affiliate links. If you sign up through one, we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. It does not change what we recommend — both tools below are measured against the same criteria.

One of these charges you a monthly fee and counts how many clients you have. The other is free and takes a percentage of every payment. Neither of those sentences tells you which is cheaper for you, because that depends on two numbers you already know and have probably never written down.

Those numbers are: how many separate people you invoice, and how large your average invoice is. Get them on paper and this comparison resolves itself in about ninety seconds. This page shows the arithmetic.

The short answer

They are metered on completely different things

This is the entire comparison, and it is the part that pricing pages present in a way that makes them look alike.

On these figures. Both sets were read from the vendors' own pricing pages on 14 August 2026 and are the standard published rates, not promotional ones — FreshBooks in particular runs heavy temporary discounts, and a discounted first year is not a price you can plan on. Where a figure could not be verified, this article says so rather than guessing.

The arithmetic, at three real volumes

Wave's fee is 2.9% + 60¢ per card payment. FreshBooks charges you nothing per payment, but the processor you connect to it will, so put your own processor's rate in where noted.

Case 1 — 4 invoices a month at $200, paid by card

Wave: 4 × ($200 × 0.029 + $0.60) = $25.60. Free plan, so that is the whole bill.

FreshBooks Lite: $23 a month, plus your processor's fees on the same four payments.

Notice what just happened. The free plan costs more than the paid one before FreshBooks' processing is even counted — and nothing on Wave's pricing page tells you that. This is the single most useful line in this comparison.

Case 2 — 25 invoices a month at $40, paid by card

Wave: 25 × ($40 × 0.029 + $0.60) = $44.00. The 60¢ is doing the damage here: on a $40 invoice it is 1.5% on top of the 2.9%, so your effective rate is about 4.4%.

Wave Pro ($19): waives the 60¢ on the first ten transactions a month. $19 + [10 × $1.16] + [15 × $1.76] = $57.00 — worse, at this volume. The Pro plan pays for itself only if you are near ten transactions, not far past it.

FreshBooks: 25 separate clients exceeds Lite's five-client limit, so you are on Plus at $43 — driven entirely by client count, not by revenue.

This is the case where both tools are awkward, and it is more common than either vendor's marketing admits. Many small invoices to many different people is the worst shape for both pricing models.

Case 3 — 3 retainer clients, one invoice each at $1,500, paid by bank transfer

FreshBooks Lite: $23. Three clients fits inside five. Bank transfer fees through your processor are typically a small flat amount rather than a percentage, so your total is roughly $23 plus a few dollars.

Wave: free, and bank payments avoid the card percentage — but if any of those clients pays by card instead, $1,500 × 0.029 + $0.60 = $44.10 for that single invoice. One card payment costs you twice the FreshBooks subscription.

The rule: the larger your invoices, the more dangerous a percentage is, and the more a flat subscription looks like insurance rather than a cost.

The two traps

FreshBooks counts clients, not invoices

Lite covers five billable clients. Not five invoices — five people. Invoice the same five clients forty times a month and you are still on Lite. Invoice six people once each and you are on Plus at $43.

That structure is generous to a retainer practice and punishing to jobbing work. A tradesperson doing one-off jobs, a tutor with a rotating roster, a photographer shooting different weddings — all of them are pushed two tiers up the price list by the shape of their client base rather than by how much they earn. Count your clients before you look at any price.

Wave's 60 cents is a percentage in disguise

A fixed 60¢ sounds trivial. Measured against the invoice, it is not:

Below about $100 an invoice, the fixed component is the story. Above $500 it disappears. If you bill small amounts often, this table matters more than either subscription price.

What each one is actually good at

Which one, concretely

Three to five ongoing clients, invoices over $500. FreshBooks Lite. Your client count fits, and at that invoice size you do not want a percentage on top of your processor's percentage.

Twenty-plus different clients, invoices under $100. Wave. FreshBooks would push you to Plus on client count alone, and you would still be paying processing. Accept the 60¢ and move on.

First year, revenue still uncertain. Wave, without hesitation. Paying $23 a month before you know whether the business works is a bad trade, and Wave's free plan is not a crippled demo.

Late payment is your actual problem. FreshBooks. You are not buying invoices, you are buying the escalation sequence, and it is the best here. If one client habitually pays sixty days late, the subscription is cheaper than the cash-flow gap.

You want one system for invoices and books. Either — both do it. Wave free if the volume is low, FreshBooks if you want the chasing done for you.

Switching between them

Wave to FreshBooks is the common direction, usually triggered by one client who will not pay on time. Client lists export cleanly. Historic invoices come out as PDFs rather than as data, so you keep the documents and lose the reporting continuity. Do it at the start of a tax year if you can, and keep the Wave account open until you have downloaded a full year of records.

FreshBooks to Wave usually happens when a business shrinks back to a smaller, higher-volume shape, or when the subscription stops feeling justified. Same mechanics: contacts move, history does not. The thing people forget is recurring invoices — every standing arrangement has to be rebuilt by hand, and any card on file has to be re-collected from the client.

What it looks like over a year

Monthly figures hide the size of this decision. Here are the same three cases annualised, using the standard published rates and assuming every invoice is paid by card.

The first two rows are close enough that the decision should be made on features rather than money. The third row is not close. At $1,500 invoices, choosing the free tool costs you over a thousand dollars a year more than the paid one — and it does it silently, sixty cents and 2.9% at a time, on money you have already earned.

That is the pattern worth remembering when any tool advertises itself as free. Free is a pricing model, not a gift, and the bill arrives in proportion to your success rather than your usage.

Three costs neither page mentions

American Express costs more

Wave charges 3.4% + 60¢ for Amex rather than 2.9% + 60¢. On a $1,000 invoice that is a five-dollar difference — small in isolation, and quietly meaningful if your clients are corporate and reach for a company Amex by default. If they do, you can simply not offer it, which is a decision you should make deliberately rather than discover in a statement.

Refunds do not refund the fee

If you refund a client, the processing fee generally stays gone. It is a small amount on a small job and a real amount on a large one, and it is the same on both platforms because it is how card processing works everywhere. The practical response is not to switch tools but to take deposits rather than full payment up front on work that might not proceed.

The subscription is charged whether you invoice or not

This is the honest downside of FreshBooks and the honest upside of Wave. A quiet month still costs $23. Three quiet months in a row — a seasonal practice, a period of illness, parental leave — cost $69 for software you did not use. Wave charges nothing in those months because it charges on payments received.

If your work is genuinely seasonal, that asymmetry may matter more than any of the arithmetic above. Model your worst quarter, not your best month.

Questions people actually ask

Is Wave really free, or is there a catch?

It is really free, and the catch is disclosed: they earn on payment processing. That is a more honest model than a free tier crippled to force an upgrade. The only trap is arithmetic — at four $200 invoices a month you are paying more than FreshBooks Lite costs, and nothing warns you.

Can I use FreshBooks without connecting a payment processor?

Yes. Send invoices, get paid by bank transfer or cheque, and no processing fee touches you. That is the cheapest possible configuration in this comparison for large invoices, and it is also the slowest way to be paid. Whether that trade is worth it depends on how patient your clients are.

Which is better for taxes?

Both export what an accountant needs. FreshBooks' reports are more familiar to accountants in the US and Canada; Wave's are perfectly adequate for a sole trader. Neither will make your tax position better or worse. Choose on cost and chasing, not on this.

Can I run both at once?

Technically yes, and it is almost always a mistake. Two systems means two places where an invoice might exist, two sets of numbers at tax time, and a client who receives a reminder from one while paying through the other. The only version that works is a clean split by client type — retainers in one, one-off jobs in the other — and even then you are doing bookkeeping twice. Pick one.

Which one will still exist in five years?

An unfair question that people are right to ask, because migrating billing is genuinely painful. Both are established products from companies that have been around for years, and neither shows signs of going anywhere. The practical protection is not choosing the bigger company — it is exporting your client list and a PDF archive once a quarter, which takes ten minutes and works regardless of what either vendor does next.

What if I only send two or three invoices a year?

Then neither, honestly. A template and a bank transfer will do. Invoicing software earns its place when you are sending enough that chasing becomes a task, or when you need a payment link because clients will not do transfers. Below that, you are buying tidiness.

The thing that actually decides it

Write down two numbers: how many separate people you invoice in a typical month, and what a typical invoice is worth. Then run the arithmetic above once for each tool.

Above roughly $200 an invoice, a percentage is the most expensive line in your software budget and a flat subscription wins. Below roughly $100 an invoice with many clients, the subscription structure punishes you on client count and free-plus-percentage wins. Between those, it is close enough that you should choose on whether you want the chasing automated.

And whichever you pick: put payment terms on the invoice before you spend an afternoon comparing tools that automate the chasing of invoices you never gave a due date. "Payable within 14 days" costs nothing to add and changes behaviour more reliably than any reminder sequence either product can send on your behalf.

Related: Best invoicing software for a business of one — the six-tool version, including four others worth knowing about. And SimplyBook.me vs Square Appointments, the same treatment for the booking side.