What does one invoice actually cost you?

How many invoices do you send a month?

How this was measured

Every figure above links the page it was read from, and that link is the claim. Most of them are the vendor's own pricing page; where a figure was read somewhere else, the link goes there instead of to a page that does not say it — QuickBooks Essentials and Plus are cited to a reseller's write-up of Intuit's August 2026 increase, not to Intuit. Read in August 2026: 33 plans across 16 vendors were priced, and 22 of them have a numeric break-even against our own rate — a volume at which they start costing under a dollar an invoice. Some of the rest are priced as a share of the invoice and some are free of a fixed price to compare against. On the remaining 3, a dollar an invoice is unreachable at any volume they will serve: the plan carries a monthly cap on invoices that sits below the number it would take to get there. They are in the table above carrying both figures, the price and the cap, because the arithmetic between them is the whole point of this page.

The gates are the other half and were measured differently: each one was observed in a real browser, on a real invoice, on the date beside it. A vendor whose download path we did not walk has no row in that table at all rather than a row taken from its own FAQ — which is also why one tool we tried is missing entirely, its Save button having done nothing three times without saying why. An inconclusive result recorded as a result is the thing this study exists not to do.

Cost per invoice is a plan's monthly price divided by the invoices you actually send that month. A plan whose own cap forbids that volume is marked rather than priced, and a plan charging a share of each invoice is shown with its rate and the invoice value at which that rate reaches a dollar.