Every QuickBooks, Xero or Wave bill you pay this year is a bill you’ll pay again next year, and the year after. LedgerPro is a one-time purchase. Here’s the real math, pulled from each vendor’s own pricing page on 2026-11-04.
Pricing, straight from each vendor’s own site
| Plan | List price | Users | Payroll |
|---|---|---|---|
| QuickBooks Online (quickbooks.intuit.com/pricing) | |||
| Free | $0/mo | 1 | No mobile app, no integrations, 2 invoices/mo cap |
| Simple Start | $38/mo | 1 | Add-on, priced separately |
| Essentials | $85/mo | 3 | Add-on, priced separately |
| Plus | $140/mo | 5 | Add-on, priced separately |
| Advanced | $340/mo | 25 | Add-on, priced separately |
| Xero (xero.com/us/pricing) | |||
| Early | $27/mo | Unlimited | +$36/mo + $6/employee |
| Growing | $59/mo | Unlimited | +$36/mo + $6/employee |
| Established | $97/mo | Unlimited | +$36/mo + $6/employee |
| Wave (waveapps.com/pricing) | |||
| Starter | $0/mo | Unlimited | Add-on, ~$25-40/mo |
| Pro | $19/mo | Unlimited | Add-on, ~$25-40/mo |
| NEXIOS LedgerPro | |||
| LedgerPro Solo | $349 one-time (intro, reg. $499) | 1 | Included, no add-on |
| LedgerPro (full) | $999 one-time (intro, reg. $1,299) | Buy the seats you need | Included, no add-on |
Xero and Wave’s prices shown are their ongoing monthly rate after any new-customer intro discount; QuickBooks similarly offers a limited-time intro rate on top of the list prices shown. All figures confirmed directly on each vendor’s own pricing page, 2026-11-04 – not a third-party estimate.
The real break-even
QuickBooks Simple Start at its $38/mo list price costs $456/year. LedgerPro’s intro price pays for itself versus Simple Start in under 2.2 years – and then it’s free, forever. Xero Early at $27/mo ($324/year) breaks even against LedgerPro in a little over 3 years. Wave’s Starter plan is genuinely free for core bookkeeping, so there’s no dollar-for-dollar case against it on price alone – the case there is what you get: real built-in payroll (not a $25-40/mo add-on), a bank feed on your own Plaid key instead of a shared one, and your books as a file you own, not a row in someone else’s database.
What’s actually different, not just cheaper
- Payroll is built in. Xero and Wave both charge a separate monthly fee per employee for payroll. QuickBooks gates it by tier. LedgerPro’s payroll – real federal withholding sourced to IRS Pub 15-T, the Social Security wage base cap, Medicare, state tax, actual pay stubs – comes with the product.
- Your books live on your own machine. A local SQLite file, not someone else’s cloud. Bank feeds run on your own Plaid developer key, never a shared vendor key.
- A hash-chained, tamper-evident audit log on every mutating action, not a generic activity feed.
- Switching isn’t a re-entry project. A built-in bridge imports a QuickBooks trial balance or ledger history and maps your chart of accounts once.
Built by someone who has sat on the other side of the audit
LedgerPro’s owner spent 35 years in the broker-dealer industry, including as a FinOp/CFO personally responsible for net capital computations, FOCUS filings and SIPC reporting – the kind of books where a wrong number has regulatory consequences, not just an annoyed accountant. The hash-chained audit trail and the attention to getting payroll tax math right aren’t generic SaaS features; they come from having had to sign filings that a regulator would actually read.
Part of a real, connected suite – not just a name
LedgerPro isn’t a standalone island. Two integrations are live and tested today:
- NEXIOS CRM reads your LedgerPro A/R balances directly, and can push customers and estimates straight into LedgerPro – no manual re-entry between sales and books.
- NEXIOS Valuation & M&A pulls a valuation export directly from your LedgerPro books via a scoped, read-only connection – your financials feeding your own valuation work, not a spreadsheet rebuilt from scratch.
Other NEXIOS products, including the BD Financial and Operations Suite, run alongside LedgerPro as independent tools on the same platform – we’d rather tell you plainly what’s connected today than imply more than what’s actually built.
Try LedgerPro free for 30 days – no credit card required. See full pricing & features