The pricing tracker

Core ledgers

The books themselves. All four ran identical sample books in our lab.

Receipt & document capture

Both ran our 15-document receipt gauntlet, photos and PDFs.

Month-end close

Mounted on our already-reconciled books with planted open items.

Client onboarding & engagement

The document chase and the engagement letter — opposite halves of onboarding, both in our lab now.

Payroll

Reviewed from the outside — payroll cannot be lab-run for a fictional company, and we say so.

Landlord finance

Bookkeeping for self-managing landlords. Stessa and Baselane went through the lab Oct 13–19, 2026, so their rows carry terms as experienced at signup and checkout; the other ten are as read from each vendor’s own pages on Sep 19, 2026, ahead of their trials.

The catch log

Dated instances of why this page exists: what our verifications caught that secondhand numbers missed.

• Oct 18, 2026 Baselane’s pricing page still prices Smart only as “$20/mo on an annual plan”, a month after we first noted it; the monthly-billed price appears nowhere, so the 30-day card trial converts at a price the page never states. Signup also asks for a mobile number labelled “no VOIP”, and accepted one.
• Oct 13, 2026 Stessa’s advertised APY moved without the app noticing: the pricing page read “up to 2.02%” (Essentials) in September and 1.88% on Oct 13, while the app the same day still showed 2.02%, and 3.49% for Pro against the page’s 3.24%. The in-app Pro upsell implies collaborators cost money; “Unlimited collaborators” is free on Essentials. Manage checkout charged exactly the advertised $15.00 (Oct 17).
• Sep 30, 2026 QuickBooks Online now has a $0 Free plan, which wasn’t on the pricing page when we tested in August. It allows one user, two invoices a month and one bank connection, and gives “No accountant access”. So a client on Free can’t give their bookkeeper a seat; that starts at Simple Start ($38/mo). The promo also changed from 90% off to 50% off for three months, and the page still makes you choose the discount or the 30-day trial.
• Sep 30, 2026 FreshBooks swapped its 90%-off promo for $1/mo on Lite for a year and 80% off Plus or Premium for three months. The fine print adds: “No free trial period is included when availing this promotional discount.” The page shows no end date, but its own code sets the campaign to end October 15, 2026, with the countdown switched off.
• Sep 30, 2026 Ignition cut its top Pro+ plan from unlimited users to 20, at the same $499/mo ($399 annual). No other tier moved.
• Sep 30, 2026 Wave’s pricing page advertises Pro at $9.50/mo for the first three months, but the offer’s own fine print says it ran “from December 2nd, 2025 until January 6th, 2026.” It was still on the page nine months after that end date, so the page doesn’t tell a buyer whether the offer is live.
• Sep 28, 2026 Xero dropped its US free trial. Since September 1, new US sign-ups go straight to "Buy now"; the "Get one month free" toggle we trialed through in August is gone. Base prices unchanged at $25 / $55 / $90.
• Sep 19, 2026 Hemlane’s “$2/unit” Basic plan costs $30 a month for one unit. The pricing page adds a $28 platform fee beneath the per-unit headline, so the advertised figure is 7% of the bill for the smallest landlord it is aimed at.
• Sep 19, 2026 Baselane’s own partner page offers referrers “up to $200” in its hero and “up to $150” in its body for the same referral. Its Smart plan is priced only as “$20/mo on an annual plan” — the monthly-billed price is not on the page at all.
• Sep 19, 2026 Rentastic tells three different price stories on its own site: the pricing page ($60/yr Core, $238/yr or $29/mo Unlimited), the FAQ ($7/mo Core and a free tier), and a “versus QuickBooks” page ($16.58/mo). We track the pricing page and note the rest.
• Sep 19, 2026 TurboTenant’s pricing page says the $199/yr Pro plan includes “built-in accounting tools”, while its rental-accounting page sells accounting as a per-unit add-on for every user at $15/mo for one unit, capped at $85. Which one a Pro subscriber actually gets is not stated anywhere we could find. To be settled at trial.
• Sep 14, 2026 Xero’s pre-charge email counts down wrong. Sent on 1 September, its subject and body both say “7 days remaining” in the free month — while the same email names the charge date as 11 September, ten days later. The free period itself ran to 10 September. The error favours the customer, since the real warning was longer than advertised, but it means the countdown and the date in one email disagree. Intuit’s equivalent notice, sent seven days before its charge date, was exact.
• Sep 1, 2026 Xero’s billing reminder — sent seven days before it charges a card, which is more warning than any other tool in the lab has given us — still carries a price-increase notice dated “From 1 Oct 2025”, eleven months stale at the time of sending. The warning itself is exact (charge date named, cancel link included); the price note attached to it tells a reader nothing about whether their own plan is moving.
• Aug 29, 2026 Ignition’s trial-expiry win-back email headlines “For just $39 a month” — but its own footnote limits the offer to a Core, Pro, or Pro+ monthly plan. $39 is the Solo tier billed annually; the cheapest plan the offer actually covers is Core monthly at $149, or 3.8× the advertised figure. Verified in Ignition’s own in-app plan chooser the same day, which also defaults to the annual toggle so the lower numbers show first.
• Aug 16, 2026 Gusto’s $35/mo contractor-only plan — still quoted by 2026 third-party pricing guides — is no longer on Gusto’s pricing page. The "Pay Myself" tab now sells a $49 S-corp Solo plan instead.
• Aug 16, 2026 Ignition’s live prices ran a tier higher than the numbers circulating in third-party guides (Pro verified at $229/mo annual, not the widely quoted $199), and its Solo tier’s $150k revenue gate is self-attested at signup.
• Aug 12, 2026 Xero launched embedded US payroll powered by Gusto — the payroll-pricing question for Xero practices changed shape entirely. Pricing for the embedded product still settling.
• Aug 10, 2026 QuickBooks Online and Xero both demand a card at "free" trial signup and provide no way to remove it afterward — the trial is a subscription with a fuse. FreshBooks, Wave, Dext, Hubdoc, Double, Content Snare, Ignition and Gusto demanded none.