KiwiBooks Is Now Free to Start, and We Mean Actually Usable
You can now run your books on KiwiBooks without paying us anything.
Not a trial that expires in fourteen days and locks your data behind a paywall. Not a demo with the useful parts greyed out. A free plan that files your Schedule C.
We want to be specific about what that means, because "free tier" has been used to describe some pretty thin experiences.
What the free plan actually does
Your Personal books plus one business. Invoices you can send and get paid on. Twenty five receipt scans a month, with the OCR reading the amount and the vendor off the photo. One vehicle with mileage tracking. The full reporting set, including a profit and loss, a balance sheet, and the tax center that turns the year into the numbers your Schedule C needs.
That is a complete bookkeeping loop. You can start in January with nothing, and finish in April with a filed return, without a card on file.
The catch, and there is one, is that the free plan is manual. You enter transactions yourself or upload a statement. Nothing is watching your bank account, and nothing is guessing your categories.
What Premium adds
Premium is $15 a month, or $120 a year if you pay annually, which works out to $10 a month and saves you a third.
The difference is not more features bolted on. It is that the software starts doing the work instead of waiting for you.
Your bank feeds itself in. Connect an account and transactions arrive on their own, categorized, deduplicated, and ready to review. This is the single biggest difference in how the product feels day to day. Manual entry is fine for twenty transactions a month. It is miserable for four hundred.
Categories get suggested, and applying one is a click. Premium reads your own history, your own rules, and a merchant table we maintain, then proposes a category on every uncategorized row. You accept it or you change it. Over a year that is thousands of small decisions the software makes a first pass at.
Payments match themselves to invoices. When money lands, KiwiBooks looks for the invoice it settles and offers you the match. You confirm, and the invoice closes.
Nine businesses instead of one, a thousand scans a month instead of twenty five, unlimited vehicles, and custom categories that fit how you actually think about your spending rather than how the IRS groups it.
Where we drew the line
The line is between the work you do and the work we do for you.
Everything that makes up your books sits on the free side. Your ledger, your invoices, your reports, your tax numbers. None of it is locked, sampled, watermarked, or held until you upgrade. You can run a business on it for years and never see a paywall.
Premium is what you buy when doing it by hand stops being reasonable. It is the same books, with the software doing the tedious part: pulling the transactions in, proposing the categories, finding the invoice a payment settles.
What we did not want to build was a free plan that exists purely to frustrate you into upgrading. If you have one business and thirty transactions a month, the free plan is not a downgrade. It is the right plan, and you should stay on it. We would rather be the software you actually use for free than the software you abandoned in February because the useful half was locked.
A note on the free plan and your accountant
If you work with a CPA who uses KiwiBooks, they can see and work in your books regardless of your plan. Their side of the product is free for firms. So a client on the free plan and a CPA on the expert console is a completely workable arrangement, and a fairly common one.
Getting started
Sign up and you land on the free plan. There is no card to enter, no trial countdown, and nothing that expires.
If and when you want the automation, Premium is one click from inside the app, and there is a launch offer running: the first year is $99 instead of $120, through the end of January 2027.
And if you try Premium and decide the manual workflow suited you better, you can go back to free and keep your data. That direction works too, which we think is the part that makes the free plan real.