What Intuit QuickBooks Online costs for a team of 1–25
At five people, Intuit QuickBooks Online on the Simple Start plan costs $38 a month — $456 a year.
The cost at your headcount
Figures are the annual-billing rate. “Billed seats” is what appears on the invoice, which is not always the number of people you have.
| People | Billed seats | Per month | Per year | Per person/mo |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 1 | $38 | $456 | $38 |
| 3 | 3 | $38 | $456 | $12.67 |
| 5 | 5 | $38 | $456 | $7.60 |
| 10 | 10 | $38 | $456 | $3.80 |
| 25 | 25 | $38 | $456 | $1.52 |
What the table above does not capture
Per company, with user caps by tier: Essentials $75 (3 users), Plus $115 (5), Advanced $275 (25). Payroll is extra.
How Intuit QuickBooks Online is priced, and what that does as you grow
Priced per organisation — $38 a month covering 1 user.
Extra users are not simply billed on top — the vendor gates them by plan tier instead, so growing past 1 user means a tier change rather than an incremental charge. Budget the tier, not the seat.
Where it sits against the accounting alternatives
At five people, Intuit QuickBooks Online is number 3 of 4 of the accounting plans we track, behind Wave at $15.83. At twenty-five it is number 2 — the ranking moves with headcount, which is the whole point of the table below.
| Product | 1 | 3 | 5 | 10 | 25 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Intuit QuickBooks Online | $38 | $38 | $38 | $38 | $38 |
| Zoho Books | $15 | $15 | $20 | $32.50 | $70 |
| Wave | $15.83 | $15.83 | $15.83 | $15.83 | $15.83 |
| FreshBooks | $23 | $45 | $67 | $122 | $287 |
The headcounts where the answer changes
Because these products are priced on different models, “cheaper” is a function of team size rather than a property of the product. These are the points where the cheaper of the two swaps over:
- vs FreshBooks — FreshBooks is cheaper below 3 people. From 3 up, Intuit QuickBooks Online is ($38 against $45).
- vs Zoho Books — Zoho Books is cheaper below 13 people. From 13 up, Intuit QuickBooks Online is ($38 against $40).
If you expect to cross one of those numbers inside the next year, price the headcount you will have rather than the one you have now. Migrating a tool you have already filled with data is the expensive way to save the difference.
What happens if you leave
Read-only access to your data for a year after you cancel.
Intuit states: "When you cancel your QuickBooks Online subscription you have read-only access to your QuickBooks Online data for one year," and you can export to Excel or to a desktop version of QuickBooks within that year. Cancel during a trial and the window is 90 days instead. If a card is declined you have 14 days of full access to fix it, after which the account is suspended and you must re-subscribe to reach your data.
The free tier
None (30-day trial or 50% off 3 months)
What this page does not tell you
Price is the easiest thing to verify and the least likely to decide whether a tool was a good idea. This page says nothing about whether your team will actually adopt it, how quickly you can remove someone's access when they leave, whether your data comes out in a usable shape, or what support is like when something breaks at month end. Those cost more than the gaps above when they go wrong, and none of them are visible on a pricing page — ours or the vendor's.
We have not run a hands-on lab test of Intuit QuickBooks Online. When we do, it will be dated and logged in the test log, and this page will link to it. Until then, treat everything here as what it is: verified arithmetic on a published price.
Sources and corrections
Rate read from https://quickbooks.intuit.com/pricing/ on , re-checked weekly. Changes we find are published in the price-change log. If a figure here is wrong, tell us — corrections are logged publicly on the corrections page.
← All 28 products in the pricing tracker
Get told when this price changes
We re-check Intuit weekly. When the rate, the seat minimum or the free tier moves, subscribers hear about it with the date and the source.