$35 a month sounds cheap until you realize you're paying $420 a year to send invoices and look at one report.
That's what most solo tradies are actually doing with QuickBooks Online. Not job costing. Not payroll. Not inventory tracking. Just invoicing, maybe expense categorization, and the occasional peek at profit and loss.
You're paying for a commercial kitchen and using the microwave.
What QuickBooks Actually Costs You
The Simple Start plan is $35/month. That's the entry point. If you got upsold to Essentials or Plus — which happens constantly — you're at $65 or $99/month.
In practice, the features that justify those tiers are built for businesses with a bookkeeper on staff, multiple users, and project-level reporting they actually review. That's not you. You're one person running calls, doing the work, and invoicing from your truck.
The real number is this: most solo operators use invoicing, the bank feed, and the mobile receipt capture. That's it. Every other feature sits there collecting digital dust while $35 pulls out of your account every month like a gym membership you forgot about.
Wave Does the Same Job for Free
Wave is accounting software built for small service businesses. It handles invoicing, expense tracking, bank connections, and basic reporting. The core product is free — not a trial, not a freemium trap with a wall after 30 days. Free.
You can send professional invoices, connect your business bank account, snap photos of receipts, and pull a profit and loss statement at tax time. That covers 90% of what a solo tradie needs from accounting software.
Wave makes money on payment processing (same rates as QuickBooks, roughly 2.9% + 30 cents per transaction) and payroll if you need it. If you're just you and no employees, the software costs you nothing.
The Switch Takes Two Hours
This is where people stall. They imagine some massive migration project and put it off for six months while the $35 keeps leaving the account.
Here's what it actually looks like. Export your customer list and open invoices from QuickBooks as a CSV. That's two clicks. Set up your Wave account, import those contacts, recreate any invoice templates you actually use, and connect your bank. Done.
You don't need to migrate years of historical data. Your accountant or bookkeeper needs clean records going forward. They don't need Wave to have every transaction from 2019 loaded in. Keep your old QuickBooks login active until the end of the current tax period if that makes you feel better, then cancel.
Two hours of setup. $420 back in your pocket every year. That's not a rounding error — that's a material and permit budget for a small job.
When QuickBooks Is Actually Worth It
There are situations where staying makes sense.
If you have employees and run payroll through QuickBooks, the integration has real value and switching gets more complicated. If your accountant is deeply embedded in your QuickBooks file and charges you less because of it, do the math before you move. If you're doing serious job costing across multiple active projects and reviewing it weekly, the Plus tier earns its keep.
But if you looked at that list and none of it applies to you? You already know what to do.
The Bigger Habit to Break
Subscription creep is one of the quietest margin killers in a solo trade business.
You sign up when the offer is good, you get busy, and you stop questioning whether the tool still earns its spot. QuickBooks is the most common example, but it's the same story with scheduling software you're not scheduling from, CRMs with contacts you never touch, and phone systems with features your calls never hit.
VettedCalls exists because most tradies were paying for call answering they weren't getting value from — or losing money to missed calls with no system at all. Same principle. Every line on your bank statement should be earning its place.
Audit your subscriptions this month the same way you'd audit a job estimate. Cut what isn't pulling weight.
This week's move
Log in to QuickBooks, look at the last three features you actually used, and if it's just invoicing and bank feed, sign up for a free Wave account today and start the two-hour migration.
Forward this
If another tradie you know is still losing leads to voicemail, send them VettedCalls.