Reference · updated regularly

The real 2026 accounting-software prices — because most "pricing" articles are wrong

Third-party roundups lag the vendor by months, sometimes a year. Below is what these tools actually cost right now, each read from the vendor's own page.

Figures verified live against each vendor's pricing page in late August–early September 2026. Where a page defaults to an annual toggle or a promo, the real list price is shown.

If you quote a client from a blog post, you may be quoting last year's price. We check these pages continuously; here's where the commonly-published numbers are out of date, and what the vendors actually charge today.

Even the price-tracking tools are behind. The pricing guides you'll find first — and some automated "price alert" services — still list QuickBooks Online Plus at $99 and Advanced at $235. The real, current list prices are $140 and $340, checked against Intuit's own page. When a tool whose whole job is tracking prices is $100 a month off on the most-used plan, a year-old blog post doesn't stand a chance. That gap is the entire reason StackWatch exists.

BILL aggregators wrong

Plan (per user / month)	Commonly listed	Actual (live)
Essentials	$45	$49
Team	$55	$65
Corporate	$79	$89
Enterprise	—	Custom

Spend & Expense is $0; the accountant (AP/AR partner) console is $49/month. The $45/$55/$79 figures still circulating online are stale — we've re-verified $49/$65/$89 nine times since August.

Dext read the toggle

Dext Business	Price
Billed monthly	$31.50 / mo
Billed annually	$25.21 / mo ($302.50/yr)

The pricing page defaults to the annual toggle, so the number most people copy ($25.21) is the annual rate, not the monthly one. Both states include 250 documents/month and 5 users. If you saw "$25/month" quoted flatly, it's missing the annual commitment.

SmartVault monthly vs annual

Plan	Monthly	Annual (per mo)	Seat min
Business Pro	$75	$55	3 users
Accounting Pro	$85	$65	2 users
Accounting Unlimited	$110	$85	2 users

Note the seat minimums — they're easy to miss and they change the real entry cost.

Karbon

Plan (per user)	Paid annually	Paid monthly
Team	$59 / mo	$79 / mo
Business	$89 / mo	$99 / mo
Enterprise	Custom pricing

Monthly billing is only available for teams of 4+ — that's a billing-cycle condition, not a seat minimum on the plan itself. Ignore any "Solo plan at $19/month" you see quoted; there is no such plan on Karbon's page.

Gusto

Plan	Base / month	Per person
Contractor Only	$35	+$6
Simple	$49	+$6
Plus	$80	+$12
Premium	$180	+$22

Gusto currently shows a "limited time" $0 base on Contractor Only for the first 6 months — that's a promo, not the list price. The list base is $35.

OnPay & Lacerte

OnPay: Payroll is $49 base/month + $6 per worker/month. The "$55/month" headline you'll see is a bundled example, not a plan price.
Lacerte (Intuit): Pay-per-return is currently $599/year (struck through from $813) — a promo the page has run for months; custom-plan pricing is quote-only.

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