Is Wave actually free?

Desk of One · Single-tool analysis · Prices last checked 15 August 2026 · Every figure linked to source · Published 2026-08-15

Disclosure: There is no affiliate link on this page. Wave pays us nothing, and no part of what follows is a paid placement. The site carries exactly one paid link, at the end of the Wise comparison, and Wave is not involved in it. That is stated here so you can weigh it accordingly.

Jump to: What you really pay The cheaper option Is Pro worth it? Which one are you?

Every figure below comes from Wave's own pricing page or help centre, linked at each table, and the arithmetic is shown so you can check it against your own numbers.

What "2.9%" really costs you

The advertised rate is 2.9% plus a flat sixty cents. Those read as one number and behave as two: the sixty cents is a fixed toll, so the smaller your invoice, the more it hurts.

What $0 actually includes

Taking Wave's own pricing page at face value, the Starter plan includes unlimited estimates, invoices, bills and bookkeeping records, invoicing from the mobile app, and a dashboard for cash flow and customers. There is no invoice cap, no client cap, and no time limit. This is worth stating plainly because a great many "free" plans in this category are none of those things — they are trials, or they cap you at five invoices a month, or they put your logo behind the paywall.

What Starter does not include is the automation: automatic bank-transaction import, auto-categorisation, and automated late-payment reminders all sit on the Pro plan. Receipts capture, payroll and a bookkeeper are separately priced add-ons on both plans.

So the free plan is a real product with a real boundary. The boundary is labour, not capacity. You will do the categorising and the chasing yourself.

Paying annually saves $38 against twelve monthly payments, which is Wave's own stated figure and matches the arithmetic: $19 × 12 = $228, less $190, is $38.

Source: waveapps.com/pricing, checked 15 August 2026. Wave also publishes CAD pricing; the figures above are the USD ones.

The sixty cents

Here is the fee table, taken from Wave's help centre rather than the marketing page, because the marketing page omits one of the three rows.

Source: Wave Help Center — Online payments processing fees and timelines, page updated 6 August 2026. Discover processing is US-only; Visa, Mastercard, Amex and bank payments are available in both the US and Canada.

"2.9%" is the number everybody quotes. It is also the number that is only true for large invoices. A flat sixty cents is a rounding error on a big bill and a meaningful surcharge on a small one, so the rate you actually pay slides depending on how you bill.

If you bill in small amounts — a $25 class, a $50 session, a $40 repair — the advertised rate understates what you pay by most of a percentage point, and at $25 it understates it by nearly two and a half. Nobody is hiding this. It is printed on the page. It is simply that "2.9% + $0.60" reads as one number and behaves as two.

The row nobody quotes

Bank payment — ACH — costs 1% with a $1 minimum, on both plans. It is on the help-centre fee table and is absent from the headline pricing page. It is, for most invoices, dramatically cheaper than the card.

There is a crossover point, and it is low:

So on any invoice above roughly fourteen dollars, bank payment is the cheaper way to be paid — and the gap widens the whole way up.

On a business billing ten $1,000 invoices a month, steering payments from card to bank is worth $196 a month. That is more than ten times what the paid plan costs, achieved by changing a default rather than buying anything.

The cost is speed and compliance. Wave states card payments reach a US business in 2 business days and bank payments in 2 to 7; in Canada, 1 business day and 1 to 6. Payments made after 8:00 PM Eastern begin processing the following business day. If your cash position cannot absorb an extra few days, the card fee is buying you something real. If it can, it is not.

Timelines from the same Wave help-centre page, updated 6 August 2026.

All of the above is a domestic comparison. If the client paying you is abroad, the card fee stops being the big number: the same $3,000 arrives for $13.74 through Wise or $174.30 through Stripe Invoicing, which is 0.46% against 5.81%.

Does the paid plan pay for itself?

This is where the pricing gets genuinely counterintuitive, so it is worth being slow about it.

Pro removes the sixty cents — but only for the first ten transactions in a monthly subscription period. Transaction eleven onward is charged at 2.9% + $0.60 again, exactly as on the free plan. The percentage never changes. Pro does not reduce the 2.9%; it waives the flat fee, ten times a month, and that is the whole of the payment benefit.

There is no invoice volume at which this turns around, because the saving is capped at ten transactions while the cost is not capped at all. Send a thousand invoices a month and your saving is still $6.

Priced honestly, Pro is a bookkeeping-automation subscription with a small payments sweetener attached, and it should be judged as one.

The condition that overrides everything above

None of this matters if your business is not in the United States or Canada.

Wave announced in November 2020 that it would focus exclusively on those two countries, and discontinued product and customer support elsewhere. The consequence is stated plainly in its help centre: users outside the US and Canada can no longer send invoices or reminders through Wave. Existing accounts outside those countries remain active — you can still create invoices and estimates, customise them, keep books manually, and send documents as a PDF or a link — but the send-from-Wave path is closed, and Wave's own guidance is to move to a partner product instead.

Source: Wave Help Center — Changes for Wave users outside the United States and Canada, page updated 3 July 2026.

This is the single most important line in this article for a large share of the people who will read it, and it is the one least likely to appear in a comparison written for an American audience. A free invoicing tool that cannot send your invoice is not a cheap option. It is not an option.

What we could not verify

Questions worth answering first

Will Wave start charging me without warning?

The plan fee, no — Starter is $0 and stays $0 unless you choose to upgrade. The processing fees are a different matter: they are deducted automatically from payments as they arrive, so they never appear as a bill you approve. That is normal for payment processing and it is disclosed, but it does mean the money leaves before you see it rather than after.

Can I use Wave free and take payment somewhere else?

Yes, and for large invoices it is often the cheapest configuration available. Invoice from Wave, put your bank details on the invoice, and no processing fee touches you at all. What you give up is the payment link, and with it the convenience that makes some clients pay faster. Whether that trade is worth 2.9% is a question about your clients, not about Wave.

Is the $0.60 negotiable or avoidable?

Not negotiable. Avoidable three ways: take bank payment instead of card, take payment outside Wave entirely, or subscribe to Pro and stay under ten transactions a month — which, as shown above, costs more than it saves.

Does billing less often actually save money?

On the fixed portion, yes, and the effect is not small. Four quarterly invoices of $750 incur four sixty-cent tolls; twelve monthly invoices of $250 incur twelve. Same revenue, three times the fixed fee. Against that, longer billing cycles mean money arrives later and a lapsed client costs you more before you notice. This is a cash-flow decision with a small fee consequence, not the other way round.

What happens to my records if I leave?

Export your client list, your transactions and a PDF archive of issued invoices on a schedule — quarterly is enough — and do it regardless of which tool you use. This is not advice specific to Wave. It is the only protection that works no matter what any vendor decides next, and it takes about ten minutes.

Is free a trap?

Not in the usual sense. There is no bait-and-switch here: the free plan is a complete invoicing and bookkeeping product, and Wave makes its money on payment processing rather than by crippling the tier you start on. The trap, if there is one, is quieter — you can spend a year on a plan that costs nothing while paying a percentage that costs a great deal, and never once look at the second number because the first one said zero.

The decision underneath the decision

Wave's plan fee and Wave's payment fee are two different products bolted together, and almost every argument about whether Wave is "really free" is an argument about the first while the money is going out through the second.

So work it in this order. First: are you in the US or Canada? If not, this is settled and Wave is not your tool. If you are, take last month's invoices, count them, and total them. Multiply the count by $0.60 and add 2.9% of the total. That figure — not the $0 on the plan card, and not the $19 on the Pro card — is what Wave costs you.

Then ask whether your clients would pay by bank transfer if the invoice made that the obvious option. For most people billing above a hundred dollars a job, that single change is worth more than any plan decision available on the page. It is also the one nobody sells you, because there is no upgrade button attached to it.

Related: FreshBooks vs Wave — the same arithmetic run against a subscription-priced alternative. Square Invoices vs Wave — two free-plus-percentage tools compared directly. And Best invoicing software for a business of one, the six-tool overview.

Newer on this subject. This page was written in the first week of the site; we have since costed more of the field:
Wave vs Zoho Invoice — against a tool that takes 0% of your money
What card processing actually costs — all twenty payment routes, ranked
Four FreshBooks alternatives that cost nothing — the four free invoicing tools
Everything we have costed — every tool we have priced, in one table