QuickBooks Self-Employed Alternatives

QuickBooks Self-Employed is not a product you can buy any more. Intuit closed it to new customers and replaced it with QuickBooks Solopreneur, and its help article on the transition is blunt about what that means for people already on it: "If you're currently subscribed to QuickBooks Self-Employed, you can still continue your subscription." The same article notes that the QuickBooks Self-Employed mobile app has not been available for download since 24 March 2024, which is what most people notice first.

So the question is not really "what should I use instead of QBSE". It is "which half of QBSE did I actually use, and what is the cheapest honest way to get that half back".

What replaced it, and what that costs today

Intuit's Solopreneur page lists three plans:

• Free — $0 a month. Send 2 invoices a month, upload 2 receipts a month, track 5 mileage trips a month, connect a bank account.
• Lite — $20 a month, advertised at 50% off for three months. Unlimited invoices, unlimited receipts, unlimited mileage, and Expert Assisted Tax powered by TurboTax.
• Simple Start — $38 a month, also advertised at 50% off for three months. Adds a sales channel connection and unlimited contractors.

There is a 30-day free trial. Intuit describes Solopreneur as "designed for one-person businesses, who may or may not use 1099 contractors", aimed at Schedule C (form 1040) filers, which is the same audience QBSE had.

Two numbers on that Free plan matter more than the $0. Two receipt uploads a month is not an expense tracker; it is a demo. Five mileage trips is one week of a delivery driver's month. The free tier exists to move you to Lite, and at $20 a month Lite is more than QBSE cost most of the people who are now reading this.

The migration, before you decide anything

Whatever you switch to, get your data out first. Intuit says you can automatically or manually migrate from QBSE to Solopreneur, and that it can switch your subscription and move most of your data across. "Most" is the operative word: its documentation notes that invoices, estimates, customer records, and QuickBooks Checking accounts should be available while banking transactions are not always part of the automatic move.

Export your transactions and download your receipt images while the old account is still live and paid. Do it before you cancel, before you migrate, and store the file somewhere that is not the app you are leaving. This is the single step people skip and the only one that cannot be undone.

The options, side by side

Wave, if the tax half was never the point

A lot of QBSE users were there for invoicing with expenses attached, not for the tax estimates. Wave's pricing page lists a Starter plan at $0 covering unlimited estimates, invoices, bills, and bookkeeping records, and a Pro plan at $19 a month or $190 a year that adds automatic bank transaction import, auto-categorisation, branded invoices, and late payment reminders. Pro is currently advertised at $9.50 a month for the first three months.

Where it falls short: receipt capture is a separate add-on, listed at $11 a month or $96 a year. If receipts are the reason you are shopping, Wave is the most expensive option on this page once you add it, and Solopreneur's Lite plan includes unlimited receipts inside its $20.

FreshBooks, if invoicing is the centre of the business

FreshBooks bundles invoicing, expenses, and time tracking in one place. Its pricing page lists Lite at $23 a month for 5 billable clients, Plus at $43 a month for 50 clients, and Premium at $70 a month for unlimited, all with a 30-day free trial and no credit card required. A 90%-off-for-three-months promotion is running at the time of writing, which makes Lite look like $2.30.

Where it falls short: the billable-client cap on Lite is the thing that catches people. Five clients is not five invoices; it is five client records. If you have a dozen small clients a year you are on Plus at $43, which is more than double Solopreneur Lite.

Zoho Expense, if you rebill costs to clients

Zoho Expense is expense-report software, and for a subset of freelancers that shape is right: you incur a cost, you itemise it, someone else reimburses it. Its pricing page lists a Free plan at $0 with a maximum of 3 users and 20 receipt scans per user a month, Standard at $4 per user a month billed monthly or $3 billed annually with 200 scans, and Premium at $6 or $5 with 1,000 scans. The trial is 14 days.

Where it falls short: four fifths of the product assumes an employer. Per diem, approval chains, corporate card feeds, multi-entity. We wrote up the full picture in Zoho Expense alternatives for freelancers, and Expensify alternatives for freelancers covers the same ground from the other big report tool.

Expensorr, if you only ever needed the record

Strip out the parts of QBSE that were about filing and what is left is smaller than the price suggests. A trustworthy record of what was spent, the receipt attached to it, the client or project it belongs to, and something an accountant can read in April.

Expensorr does that part. Photograph a receipt and the merchant, date, total, and suggested category come back as a draft transaction you confirm. Say what you spent out loud and it parses the amount, merchant, and category out of the sentence. Labels tag a transaction by client, project, or trip independently of its category, wallets keep cash and card balances separate, budgets track category limits against real transactions, and 75 currencies are recorded natively with exchange-rate conversion. Existing history imports from CSV, XLSX, or XLS, so a QuickBooks export becomes real transactions rather than a file in your downloads folder.

State the limits plainly, because they are the whole reason this is the last section and not the first. Expensorr does not connect to your bank. There is no automatic feed and no card reconciliation. It does not file taxes, calculate deductions, or produce a Schedule C. It has no team accounts, employee roles, or approval workflows. Every one of those is a real QuickBooks capability that Expensorr does not answer.

Every feature is free, including unlimited wallets, budgets, labels, splits, and 75 currencies. The free plan includes 20 AI receipt scans or voice captures a month, and the paid tier lifts that limit and changes nothing else. Expense tracking for freelancers covers the year-round workflow, and how to track expenses from receipts shows what the capture step actually looks like.

When you should stay with Intuit

• You relied on the bank feed. This is the big one. QBSE pulled transactions in automatically and you swiped them into business or personal. No free personal expense app replaces that, Expensorr included. If the feed is why the system worked for you, Solopreneur is the right answer and the rest of this page is noise.
• You used the estimated tax numbers. Solopreneur's Lite plan includes Expert Assisted Tax powered by TurboTax, and the handoff into filing is the thing Intuit builds better than anyone.
• Your accountant asks for QuickBooks. If they already work in it, the switching cost lands on them and comes back to you as billable hours.
• You track mileage seriously. Automatic trip capture is a real feature with real value. Free gives you 5 trips a month; Lite gives you unlimited.
• You are still on a working QBSE subscription and nothing is broken. Intuit says you can continue it. Migrating a live record because a product was renamed is how people end up with two half-maintained sets of books.

Choosing in one line

Stay on Solopreneur if the bank feed, the mileage tracking, or the tax handoff is what you were paying for. Go to Wave if you want free invoicing and can live without receipt capture, to FreshBooks if billing clients is the centre of the business, to Zoho Expense if you rebill costs and need the report format, and to Expensorr if what you actually needed was a clean, receipt-backed personal record and none of the filing machinery around it. If price is the whole reason you are here, free alternatives to paid expense trackers works through what each free tier really gives you.

Sources, all checked on 10 September 2026: Intuit's introduction to QuickBooks Solopreneur for QBSE availability, the mobile app date, the migration, and the Schedule C audience; the QuickBooks Solopreneur page for the Free, Lite, and Simple Start plans, their prices, the promotion, and the plan limits; Wave pricing; FreshBooks pricing; and Zoho Expense pricing. Prices and promotions change often, so verify before you subscribe. This is not tax advice; talk to your own accountant about your situation.