QuickBooks Solopreneur Pricing and QuickBooks Self Employed Cost

QuickBooks Solopreneur is $20 per month at list price. On Intuit's current Solopreneur page the $20 paid tier is sold as QuickBooks Lite, which new customers can start at $10 a month for three months. People who signed up for the original Solopreneur plan keep it at $20 a month until they cancel or change plans.

The step above that is Simple Start at $38 a month. The gap is $18 a month, or $216 a year at list, and it buys accountant access, the full set of business reports and the double-entry books a tax preparer expects to see. For a sole proprietor who hands a file to a CPA every spring, that $216 is often cheaper than the hours an accountant bills to rebuild the books from a lighter app.

No, QuickBooks Solopreneur itself is a paid plan, but Intuit now offers a QuickBooks Free tier on the same page. Free costs $0 with no credit card, covers one user, two invoices a month (unlimited if you turn on QuickBooks Payments), two receipt uploads, five mileage trips, one contractor and the top three reports. It is a way to try the app, not to run a year of books.

Most people outgrow Free in the first busy month. If you send more than two invoices or log more than five business trips, plan on Lite at $20 or Simple Start at $38 from the start, and use the intro offer rather than switching mid-year.

The row that decides it for most buyers is accountant access. Lite is built for the person who does their own books and files with help from Intuit's Expert Assisted Tax, which Intuit bills only when you file. Simple Start is the plan your bookkeeper or CPA can log into, and it is the one that grows into Essentials and Plus without moving your data.

QuickBooks Solopreneur is the replacement for QuickBooks Self-Employed, not the same product. Intuit launched Solopreneur in February 2024 and stopped selling Self-Employed to new customers. Both focus on one-person businesses, mileage and quarterly estimated taxes, but Solopreneur is built on the newer QuickBooks platform and some switchers reported in Intuit's community that their old records did not carry over.

That last point matters if you still have years of Self-Employed or Quicken data. Intuit community staff have told switchers to export their data, reports and lists before changing plans, because the old account is not reachable once the move completes. Keep a copy of every export before you cancel anything.

Yes for existing subscribers, and in a reshaped form for new buyers. Intuit's Solopreneur page now sells Free, Lite and Simple Start, and the $20 paid tier new customers see is QuickBooks Lite. In March 2026 a QuickBooks team member confirmed you cannot switch a Solopreneur subscription directly to Lite: you cancel Solopreneur, then subscribe to Lite with the same Intuit login.

If you are on Solopreneur today and happy with it, there is no price reason to move, since both cost $20 at list. The reason to switch is the Lite intro offer or the newer feature set. Export first, then cancel at the end of a billing cycle so you are not paying for two plans in the same month.

QuickBooks Solopreneur is built around income, expenses, mileage and tax estimates rather than full double-entry accounting, so it does not give you the chart of accounts and balance sheet reporting that Simple Start includes. If a lender, investor or your CPA asks for a balance sheet, Simple Start at $38 a month is the cheapest QuickBooks plan that produces one properly.

This is the most common reason sole proprietors move up a plan after their first tax season. Our QuickBooks Online Simple Start pricing page breaks that plan down the same way, including what a first year costs on the intro offer.

Yes. Estimating quarterly federal taxes for a self-employed person is one of the core jobs of QuickBooks Solopreneur, carried over from Self-Employed. It sorts business and personal spending, applies deductions such as mileage, and shows an estimated amount for each IRS due date (April, June, September and January). You still pay the IRS yourself through IRS Direct Pay or EFTPS.

An estimate is only as good as the transactions behind it. If half your year sits in Quicken or in bank downloads that never made it into QuickBooks, the estimate will be low. Bring the missing months in before you rely on the number.

No. QuickBooks Solopreneur and Lite do not include payroll, because they are designed for a business of one. They let you pay a small number of contractors (three on Lite) and track those payments for 1099s. If you hire your first W-2 employee, Simple Start can attach QuickBooks Payroll as a separate paid add-on.

Not as a QIF file. Every QuickBooks plan imports bank transactions through a live bank connection or by uploading a bank file, and Intuit lists QBO (Web Connect) as the preferred file type, with QFX and CSV also accepted. Quicken exports QIF, which QuickBooks rejects. Convert the QIF to QBO with the converter at the top of this page, then use Upload from file on the bank account.

A QuickBooks representative described the Solopreneur steps in the Intuit community: Transactions, then Bank transactions, pick the account tile, open the Link account menu and choose Upload from file, then map the columns and pick the rows to import. If your Lite account does not show that option, Simple Start supports it as part of standard QuickBooks Online banking. For the full move from a Quicken business file, see Quicken Home and Business to QuickBooks.

QuickBooks Solopreneur, now sold as Lite, is worth $20 a month if you are one person who invoices clients, drives for work and wants quarterly tax estimates without learning accounting. It is not worth it if you already work with a CPA who wants to log in, need a balance sheet, or plan to hire. In those cases Simple Start at $38 is the better buy from day one.

Compare it with what you pay now. Quicken Business and Personal runs about $108 a year on the cloud version at regular price and covers home and business money in one app, but it is a single-user desktop-style product your accountant cannot log into. If you are leaving Quicken for QuickBooks, our Quicken Home and Business vs QuickBooks comparison walks through that decision.

QuickBooks Self-Employed is no longer sold to new customers, so there is no current price to pay for it. The plan that replaced it, QuickBooks Solopreneur, costs $20 a month, and new buyers see that $20 tier as QuickBooks Lite with a $10 intro rate for three months. If a site quotes a Self-Employed price for 2026, it is describing the old product.

For a sole proprietor who files Schedule C alone and never shares the books, Lite at $20 a month is the cheapest plan that removes the Free limits. For a sole proprietor who pays a CPA, sells online, or expects to hire, Simple Start at $38 is the best plan, because it adds accountant access and full reports and upgrades in place to Essentials and Plus.

Whichever you pick, start the subscription with your history already in it. Load the last year of Quicken or bank QIF data on day one, so your first estimated tax figure and your first profit and loss report are complete. The QIF to QuickBooks Online guide covers the upload step by step.

Yes. QuickBooks Solopreneur and Lite are month-to-month, and you can cancel from the gear icon under Subscriptions and billing while signed in as the primary admin. Access continues until the end of the paid billing period. If you subscribed through the Apple or Google app store, you must cancel there, because Intuit cannot process app store cancellations.

Export your transactions, reports and lists before you cancel. A CSV export plus your original bank files is the safest record to keep for the IRS, whatever happens to the account later.

Buy Solopreneur or Lite if you are a freelancer, consultant, gig worker or single-member LLC with no employees, a handful of contractors at most, and no accountant who needs to log in. Buy Simple Start if any of those change in the next year. Buying the right plan once is cheaper than migrating twice, and the history you load on day one decides how useful every report is.