What Wave costs for a team of 1–25
At five people, Wave on the Pro plan costs $15.83 a month — $189.96 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 | $15.83 | $189.96 | $15.83 |
| 3 | 3 | $15.83 | $189.96 | $5.28 |
| 5 | 5 | $15.83 | $189.96 | $3.17 |
| 10 | 10 | $15.83 | $189.96 | $1.58 |
| 25 | 25 | $15.83 | $189.96 | $0.63 |
What the table above does not capture
$190/yr. The free tier is genuinely usable for a solo business.
How Wave is priced, and what that does as you grow
Priced per organisation — $15.83 a month regardless of how many people use it.
Because headcount does not enter the bill at all, the per-person cost falls every time you hire — this is the model that gets cheaper as you grow, and the one most per-seat comparisons make look expensive by quoting it at one user.
Monthly billing costs 20% more
$15.83 per account on annual billing, $19 month-to-month. At five people that is $15.83 a month against $19 — $38.04 a year for the privilege of being able to stop.
Monthly billing buys the option to leave. On a tool you have already decided to keep, that option is one you are paying 20% for and will not exercise. On a tool you are still evaluating, it is worth every cent — which is why the decision belongs after a subscription audit, not before one.
Where it sits against the accounting alternatives
At five people, Wave is the cheapest of the accounting plans we track.
| Product | 1 | 3 | 5 | 10 | 25 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Wave | $15.83 | $15.83 | $15.83 | $15.83 | $15.83 |
| Zoho Books | $15 | $15 | $20 | $32.50 | $70 |
| Intuit QuickBooks Online | $38 | $38 | $38 | $38 | $38 |
| 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 Zoho Books — Zoho Books is cheaper below 4 people. From 4 up, Wave is ($15.83 against $17.50).
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.
The free tier
Starter free: unlimited invoicing and bookkeeping (card fees apply)
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 Wave. 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://www.waveapps.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 Wave weekly. When the rate, the seat minimum or the free tier moves, subscribers hear about it with the date and the source.