Priced by what kind of business you are: the accounting ladder with no tiers to choose from

Almost every subscription in software sells you a ladder of capability. The cheap rung does less, the dear rung does more, and choosing is a judgement about what you need. Accounting software mostly follows that pattern, and FreeAgent does not. Its four price points are named for legal structures rather than feature sets: limited companies, partnerships and limited liability partnerships, sole traders, and unincorporated landlords. You do not choose among them in any meaningful sense. Your business's legal form chooses for you.

The prices are £33 a month for a limited company, £27 for a partnership or LLP, £19 for a sole trader, and £10 for an unincorporated landlord. That spread is more than threefold from top to bottom, and none of it is about how many invoices you send or how many users you need.

The logic is not mysterious once you see it. What accounting software actually does for you is the compliance work attached to your legal form, and that work differs enormously. A limited company files statutory accounts and a corporation tax return, runs payroll and has directors to account for. A sole trader files a self-assessment. An unincorporated landlord files property pages. The price is tracking the obligations rather than the features, which is arguably a more honest basis for it than a list of capabilities most subscribers never touch.

For the buyer this changes the shape of the decision entirely. There is no cheap tier to consider and no upgrade path to plan for, so the questions that dominate most software purchases — will I outgrow this, should I start small — simply do not arise. What replaces them is a single comparison: at your entity type, what does this cost against the alternatives, and does your accountant work with it. The second half of that matters more in accounting than in almost any other category, and it is not a price question at all.

The annual arithmetic here is unusually clean and rewards checking. Every one of the four yearly totals is exactly ten times its monthly rate — a sole trader pays £190 for the year against £19 a month, a saving of £38, which is two months to the penny — and the same relationship holds on all four ladders without exception. Two months free, uniformly applied, and confirmable in a few seconds from two published figures. That is the checkable form of an annual discount, and it is rarer than it should be.

The introductory rate carries the usual caution, and here it is unusually regular. Each of the four entity prices is advertised at exactly half its standing rate for an introductory period. A discount landing on precisely one half across an entire ladder is a designed number rather than a remembered one, and it means the figure in large type is not the price you will pay for most of the time you use the product. Budget on the standing rate above; treat the advertised one as a first-period rate, as in the rest of this category.

That caution is worth generalising, because accounting software is the most heavily discounted category we hold. Two other well-known packages in it advertise their entire ladders at a fraction of the standing price for the first few months — one at a tenth — which is a far steeper first-period discount than software generally runs. A category where nearly every headline is an introductory rate is a category where comparing headlines tells you almost nothing.

One structural note for completeness. This page is published only to our British edition, because FreeAgent is a UK product priced in sterling and there is no American or eurozone price for it to carry. That is the same rule described in when we refuse to compare — a page should carry your prices or no prices — applied to a vendor that genuinely only has one market.