Invoicing apps have found a meter nobody asked for: your client list. FreshBooks, Xero and Invoice2go each cap the cheapest plan by how many clients you bill or how many invoices you send, so the bill grows exactly when the business does. Here is what each one counts, what the next client costs, and which tools in our catalog count nothing at all. Every price was checked on Oct 20, 2026 from the vendor's own page.
What each plan counts
FreshBooks. Lite is $23 a month and lets you "send invoices to 5 clients". Plus is $43 for 50 clients. Premium is $70 for unlimited clients. Each extra team member is $11 a month, and Advanced Payments is another $20. FreshBooks' own Price Change 2026 FAQ says the current list prices took effect on or after March 5, 2026. The page is running 80% off for the first 4 months right now, which is worth reading twice: the discount ends, the client cap does not.
Xero. No client cap, an invoice cap instead. Early is $27 a month and covers quotes and 20 invoices, and Xero's footnote adds that invoices created by connected apps can count toward that limit. Growing is $59 and Established is $97, both without an invoice limit. To Xero's credit, it says "no per-user license fees" in the banner, and it means it.
Invoice2go. Starter allows 30 invoices a year, Professional 100 a year, and Premium is unlimited. That is per year, not per month: 30 invoices is two and a half a month. The dollar figures did not show on the page when we checked, so we are not quoting one. The page does say every plan includes unlimited team members, and it lists card fees of 3.5% on Starter, 3.0% on Professional and 2.9% on Premium.
The sixth client
The cap matters most at the edge. On FreshBooks Lite, the sixth client moves you to Plus, a $20 a month jump, or $240 a year at list price, to send one more invoice to one more person. At client 51 it is another $27. Spread across a full Lite plan, you are paying $4.60 per client per month for the right to bill them.
| Tool | Cheapest paid plan | What it counts | Free plan |
|---|---|---|---|
| FreshBooks | $23/mo (Lite) | 5 billable clients | None |
| Xero | $27/mo (Early) | 20 invoices | None |
| Invoice Ninja | $14/mo (Pro) | Nothing on Pro | Up to 5 clients |
| Wave | $19/mo (Pro) | Nothing | Unlimited invoices |
| Zoho Invoice | No paid plan | 500 invoices a year, 2 users | Everything |
A seat cap charges you for hiring. A client cap charges you for selling. Only one of those is a cost you were trying to avoid.
The wider catalog is less hostile than the headline names. Of the 311 invoicing tools live in our catalog today, 147 have a free tier, and the median lowest paid plan among the 157 that list a price is $12 a month. The expensive, metered option is the famous one, not the typical one.
FreshBooks alternatives that don't count your clients
Free and hosted. Wave Starter is $0 and lets you "create unlimited estimates, invoices, bills, and bookkeeping records". Wave's price shows up in payments instead: 2.9% + $0.60 per card transaction on Starter. Pro is $19 a month and drops the fixed $0.60 on your first 10 card payments each month. Zoho Invoice is $0 with one plan, up to 2 users and 500 invoices a year, with "Powered by Zoho Invoice" on what you send.
Cheap and hosted. Invoice Ninja is free for up to 5 clients with unlimited invoicing, then $14 a month (or $140 a year) for unlimited clients on Pro. The cap is still there on the free plan, but the step after it costs $14, not $20 on top of $23. SolidInvoice lists a hosted plan at a flat $8 a month in its README.
Self-hosted. Invoice Ninja's code is source-available under the Elastic License, has about 10.3k stars on GitHub, and its README says every Pro and Enterprise feature is in it; the one charge it mentions is a $40 a year white-label licence to remove its branding. SolidInvoice is MIT licensed with 979 stars and says self-hosting is "free forever". InvoicePlane is MIT licensed, about 3.2k stars, built for exactly this job (repo). InvoiceShelf is AGPL-3.0 with about 1.9k stars, though its README warns the default 3.x branch is an alpha and points production users to 2.x.
One thing the star counts will not tell you. Crater has about 8.4k stars and an AGPL licence, and its last release was in March 2022, with the last commit in February 2023. Stars measure how many people liked a project once. Check the commit history before you trust it with your receivables.
What you give up
FreshBooks is not charging for nothing. You get a hosted app you never have to patch, and a company whose whole job is getting your invoices delivered and your payments matched up. If you bill 3 clients and never plan to bill 6, Lite is a fair price for not thinking about it. And a free hosted tool still costs something: Wave's $0.60 per card payment adds up fast if your clients pay many small invoices by card.
Self-hosting has a sharper edge. InvoicePlane's latest release, v1.7.2, is a security release that fixes a critical remote code execution flaw rated 9.9 out of 10 plus around 40 other issues. That is the project doing its job. It is also a reminder that if you host your own invoicing, you are the one who has to install that patch, on a server holding every client's name and every amount they owe you.
How to read an invoicing pricing page
- What is counted: clients, invoices, or users? FreshBooks counts clients, Xero and Invoice2go count invoices, Invoice Ninja Enterprise counts users.
- Per month or per year? Invoice2go's 30 and Zoho Invoice's 500 are per year.
- What does the next step cost? On FreshBooks, the sixth client is $20 a month.
- What does getting paid cost? Card fees run from 2.9% + $0.30 at FreshBooks to 2.9% + $0.60 on Wave Starter. On a free plan, this is the price.
- Is the price on the page a promo? FreshBooks and Xero both lead with a discount that ends in months.
What we do about it
AppClap reads pricing pages so you do not have to, we never take money from vendors, and when a page does not show a number we say so instead of guessing. If you are leaving FreshBooks, the FreshBooks alternatives page lists the options we track, and Invoice2go has its own page with what we know about it.
Or describe the job in your own words, the way someone did four times in the last 30 days: something to send invoices and chase late payments.
Sources: freshbooks.com, FreshBooks Pricing; freshbooks.com, Price Change 2026 FAQ; xero.com/us, Pricing plans; invoice.2go.com, Pricing; waveapps.com, Pricing; zoho.com/us/invoice, Pricing; invoiceninja.com, Pricing plans; GitHub repos and READMEs for invoiceninja/invoiceninja, SolidInvoice/SolidInvoice, InvoicePlane/InvoicePlane (release v1.7.2), InvoiceShelf/InvoiceShelf and crater-invoice-inc/crater; AppClap catalog counts, Oct 20, 2026. All checked Oct 20, 2026.
