Your spreadsheet is free too. Here is what free should actually get you.

Every accounting tool advertises a free plan. Most of them mean "free until you do anything useful" — three invoices a month, one user, a watermark on your PDFs, and an upgrade prompt on every screen.

So let us start from the honest position: your spreadsheet is already free, and it has no limits at all. Free, by itself, is not a reason to switch.

The real question is what free actually gets you — and where the limits sit when you eventually meet them.

What "free" costs you in a spreadsheet

A spreadsheet has no licence fee. It still has a price, you just pay it in a currency that never shows up on a bank statement.

• Your evenings. Every invoice total, every running balance, every "what did we spend on fuel last quarter" is a thing you assemble by hand.
• Errors you cannot see. A spreadsheet will happily let debits and credits disagree forever. Double-entry catches that automatically, because the books simply will not balance.
• No answer to "who changed this?" The moment a second person touches the file, you have lost the audit trail — and you will not notice until you need it.
• Re-typing. Quote, invoice, payment, ledger. The same customer and the same amount, four times, four chances to fat-finger a digit.

None of that is an argument against spreadsheets when you are one person with forty transactions a month. We wrote about exactly when that stops being true. It is an argument against calling a spreadsheet free.

What is free in KasbPro

Not a trial. Not a starter tier. No card required to sign up.

The parts that matter most, and that other tools usually meter:

• Unlimited transactions. Income, expenses, transfers. No monthly cap.
• Unlimited team members. Not three seats, not five. Unlimited.
• Sales invoices and purchase bills — line items, tax, stock-synced, themed PDFs, partial or full payments.
• Payroll runs — gross pay, itemised deductions, net pay, and a themed payslip PDF.
• Attendance and leave — daily sheet, monthly totals, leave balances and approvals, with staff clocking in from their own phones.
• CRM — leads, a Kanban deal pipeline, quotations priced from inventory, and deal-to-invoice when you win.
• Roles and data scoping — staff see only their branch or project, enforced in the database and not just hidden in the interface.
• Spending approvals — entries over your limit wait for you before they touch the books.
• Export and import — Excel, CSV, JSON, plus an automatic monthly backup.

Real double-entry runs behind all of it, whether or not you ever look at a journal.

The part that actually matters for scaling

Look again at two items on that list: unlimited transactions and unlimited team members.

Most business software is priced per user. That model quietly punishes exactly the thing you are trying to do. Hire a second bookkeeper, add a warehouse assistant, give three shop staff their own logins — and the bill goes up every single time. Plenty of small businesses respond by sharing one login between four people, which destroys the audit trail they were paying for in the first place.

We do not charge per seat. Give everyone their own login with the right role, because that is what makes the books trustworthy. Growing your team should not be a billing event.

If a pricing page charges per user, it is charging you for growing. Read that page carefully before you commit, whoever you end up choosing.

What is not free — plainly

Here is the part most "we're free!" articles leave out.

Free covers running the business day to day. Pro covers the accountant-facing layer on top.

To be direct about the line we drew: the core financial statements are free. A Profit & Loss for your tax return, a Balance Sheet for a loan application, a Trial Balance to check your own books — none of that costs anything, ever. A report is just a query over data you already own, so charging you to look at your own numbers never sat right with us.

What Pro adds is the layer beyond that: segment and budget reporting, the accountant-ready audit pack, and the AI features. Those either take real work to maintain or cost us money every time you use them, which is the honest reason they sit behind a price.

When you should pay us

Genuinely: not until one of these is true.

1. You want Budget vs Actual, or profitability split by branch or project.
2. Your accountant wants the full audit pack rather than the statements themselves.
3. You are entering enough receipts by hand that AI scanning would buy back real hours.
4. You want to ask questions of your books in plain language instead of building a report.

Until then the free plan is not a lead magnet we are hoping you outgrow. It is the product.

The honest summary

Free is not why you should leave your spreadsheet — your spreadsheet was free first. Leave it when a second person needs to write to the books, when stock and sales stop reconciling, or when you cannot answer who owes you money in ten seconds.

When that day comes, what you want is a tool where growing the team does not grow the bill, and where the free tier is a real product rather than a countdown.

Start free, no card. Pay us in a year if the reports turn out to be worth $49 — and do not pay us if they are not.

If you ever need the Pro features but want to keep using KasbPro for free, there is another way: just refer a friend. Every time a business you refer becomes a paying customer, you both get 3 months of Pro for free. Refer 4 businesses, and your entire year is covered. Keep referring, and Pro stays free for life.