If you opened Wave one morning this summer and your bank transactions had stopped arriving, nothing broke. On June 1, 2026 Wave moved legacy free businesses onto its Starter plan, and bank connections moved with it — behind Pro, at $19 a month. The notice went out on April 30. There was no grandfathering.
That is the whole change, and it is worth being precise about, because a good deal of what has been written since implies Wave stopped being free. It did not.
What you still have for nothing
The free Starter plan still does unlimited invoices, estimates and bills. It still categorizes, reconciles and reports. You can still upload a bank statement by hand and have the transactions land in your books. If invoicing is the job, that is a genuinely good free product and you should keep using it.
Two things left: the automatic bank feed, and the ability to share the business with another person.
One thing was never free, and it catches people out because it sounds like it ought to be: receipt capture. Photographing a receipt and having Wave read it into a bookkeeping record is a paid add-on on Starter — $11 a month, or $96 a year — and comes included with Pro. So the real cost of a free Wave account that also handles receipts is $11 a month, which is a different comparison than the one most people are making.
What moved on June 1, 2026
The free plan lost two things. It kept the rest.
Check whether you have a hole in your books
This is the part worth doing before anything else, and it is the reason the June change matters more than the price.
A bank feed does not announce that it has stopped. It simply stops, and the ledger below it looks exactly as it did — correct, tidy, reconciled up to a date that keeps receding. If your feed switched off on June 1 and you have not uploaded a statement since, your books are missing the whole summer, and every report drawn from them is confidently wrong.
Open Wave and look at the newest transaction in your account register. If the most recent one is dated late May or early June, you have found it. Three months is enough to matter: it is a quarter of a year of deductions you have not claimed, and a quarterly estimate calculated from a number with a summer-shaped gap in it.
The fix is not urgent, but it is manual. Download statements for every month since the feed stopped and upload them — that still works on the free plan. Do it before you decide anything about software, because the decision is easier to make when you can see a full year.
First: you may not need to move
Three situations where staying is the right answer, and we would rather say so than sell you something.
You invoice and that is most of it. Wave’s free invoicing is better than a lot of paid invoicing. Nothing about the June change touched it.
You have employees, or you will. Wave does payroll from $25 a month. BrassWell does not do payroll at all, and is not going to.
Your accountant already works in Wave. A bookkeeper who knows where everything is beats any feature comparison. Pay the $19 and keep them happy.
The reason people leave is not the $19
Almost nobody switches accounting software over eleven dollars. What sends people looking is a mismatch that the price change merely made them notice.
Wave is double-entry accounting software. It is built on the assumption that a business has revenue, costs, and a month that broadly resembles the last one. It produces a balance sheet, and a profit-and-loss, and both are correct.
What it does not do is answer the question a self-employed person actually asks, which is not what did I earn but how much of this is mine. There is no tax set-aside in Wave. No quarterly estimate. Nothing that looks at a $4,000 month and tells you that $1,100 of it belongs to the IRS and should not be spent.
Wave Pro and BrassWell Pro, side by side
Both cost real money and both import your bank. Here is the part comparison pages usually leave out: Wave Pro is cheaper. $19 a month against $29.99, and for that $19 you also get double-entry reporting and the option of payroll, neither of which we offer.
If automatic bank import at the lowest price is your whole requirement, stop reading and pay Wave. That is a real answer.
What the extra eleven dollars buys here is a different shape of question. Money arrives, and the app splits it — tax, expenses, what is actually yours — before you have a chance to spend the tax. The year adds up against Schedule C lines as you go, so filing is reading a number off rather than re-sorting twelve months in March. And the whole thing assumes your months are lumpy, because they are.
The other alternatives, honestly
Zoho Books has a free tier with a revenue ceiling and is a serious piece of software above it. Deeper than Wave, and heavier.
FreshBooks is where a lot of people go for invoicing. Watch the per-client pricing if you have many small clients rather than a few large ones.
QuickBooks Solopreneur is Intuit’s replacement for Self-Employed. If you left QuickBooks recently, going back is a decision to make deliberately rather than by default — we wrote that one up separately.
A spreadsheet. Genuinely. If you bill four clients a year, a spreadsheet and a folder of receipts is not a worse system, it is a cheaper one.
What "built for a business" actually means
The phrase gets used as marketing, so it is worth saying concretely. Double-entry accounting exists to keep a balance sheet true. Every transaction touches two accounts, assets equal liabilities plus equity, and the reward for that discipline is a set of statements a lender or an investor will accept.
That is a real thing to want, and if you want it, Wave gives it to you free. Most self-employed people do not want it. They want to know whether they can pay themselves this month, and what they are going to owe in January, and neither question is answered anywhere on a balance sheet.
The mismatch is not that Wave is bad software. It is that a sole proprietor with four clients and a lumpy year is being handed the tool a company with a bookkeeper needs, and then blamed for finding it heavy.
Getting your data out of Wave
Do this before you cancel anything, and do it while you can still sign in. Exports are the one thing that becomes difficult exactly when you most need them.
Wave exports transactions and invoice lists as CSV from the reports section. Take the full history rather than the current year — you want the prior year available when someone asks about a deduction two Aprils from now. Save the PDFs of any invoices still unpaid. Then check the export actually opens before you close the account.
BrassWell imports CSV, so a Wave export goes in without retyping. Anything the import cannot match is listed rather than silently dropped.
What switching actually costs you
An afternoon, roughly, and it is worth naming the parts nobody mentions.
Your historical books stay in the export, not in the new app’s reports — imported transactions are records, not a reconstructed general ledger. If you need a balance sheet for a lender, print it from Wave before you go. And if your bank is one Plaid connects to slowly, the first import can take a few minutes rather than seconds.
None of that is a reason to stay. All of it is a reason to switch on a quiet Tuesday rather than the week before a filing deadline.
Questions, answered
Is Wave still free in 2026?
Yes. The Starter plan costs nothing and still includes unlimited invoices, estimates and bills, transaction categorization, reconciliation and reporting, plus manual upload of bank statements. What changed on June 1, 2026 is that automatic bank connections and the ability to add other users moved to the Pro plan at $19 per month.
What happened to Wave on June 1, 2026?
Wave migrated legacy free businesses onto its Starter plan. Bank connections for automatic transaction import, and sharing a business with additional users, became Pro features. Affected users were emailed on April 30, 2026 and there was no grandfathering, except for businesses already using paid Wave services such as payments or payroll.
Can I still import bank transactions on Wave for free?
Manually, yes. Uploading a bank statement file and categorizing the transactions remains part of the free Starter plan. It is the automatic, continuous bank feed that now requires Pro.
Is receipt scanning included in Wave’s free plan?
No. Digitally capturing receipts and turning them into bookkeeping records is a paid add-on. On the free Starter plan it costs $11 per month or $96 per year; it is included with the Pro plan. You can still attach documents and enter expenses by hand for free, but the scan-and-read feature has never been part of the free tier.
Is BrassWell cheaper than Wave?
No, not for bank import. Wave Pro is $19 per month and BrassWell Pro is $29.99. Wave also includes double-entry reporting and offers payroll, neither of which BrassWell does. BrassWell is built around tax set-aside, quarterly estimates and Schedule C categories for irregular self-employed income, which Wave does not do at any price.
How do I export my data from Wave?
Wave exports transactions and invoice lists as CSV from its reports section. Take the full history rather than the current year, save PDFs of any unpaid invoices, and confirm the export file opens before you close the account. BrassWell imports CSV directly, and lists anything it cannot match rather than dropping it silently.
Sources
- FAQ: Plans for legacy businesses — Wave Help Center. The June 1, 2026 migration date, the April 30 notice, the absence of grandfathering, and exactly which features moved to Pro.
- Wave pricing — Wave. Current plan names and prices: Starter at $0, Pro at $19 monthly or $190 annually, the receipt-capture add-on at $11/month on Starter, and the payment processing rates.
Looking for more?
Related guides
- QuickBooks Self-Employed alternativeThe other switcher page, after that product shut down.
- How much to set aside for taxesThe number Wave has never calculated for you.
- Budgeting on irregular incomePercentages, not fixed amounts, when months do not match.
- Opening a business bank accountWorth doing before you connect anything to anything.
Elsewhere on BrassWell
- All guidesEverything we’ve written, in one place.
- Support Center48 answers, written the way these guides are.
- How BrassWell worksIncome, buckets, tax set-aside and invoicing.
- Ask us directlyA person replies, 9 AM–5 PM Pacific, Mon–Fri.
Prices and plan contents checked against Wave’s own pricing page and help center on September 9, 2026, and they change. Wave is a product of Wave Financial Inc. and is not affiliated with BrassWell. This is a comparison written by a competitor, which is a reason to check the primary sources linked above rather than take our word for it.