how much is quickbooks online

QuickBooks Online plan tiers, explained

QuickBooks Online is sold in four main tiers (Simple Start, Essentials, Plus, and Advanced), with each step up adding users, more automation, inventory tracking, and reporting depth. Intuit runs promotions constantly (often 50% off for the first 3 months), so the price you see on any given day may not reflect the standard rate.

Rather than quoting exact numbers that will be stale by the time you read this, know the general pattern: Simple Start is built for a single user tracking income and expenses with basic invoicing; Essentials adds bill management and multiple users; Plus adds inventory and project/class tracking, which most product sellers need; Advanced adds custom user permissions, deeper reporting, and batch invoicing for larger teams. Check the current schedule directly on QuickBooks' pricing page before budgeting, since tiers and prices are revised at least annually.

Two pricing behaviors are worth knowing before you sign up. First, the promotional discount and the 30-day free trial are usually mutually exclusive; you pick one. If you already know QuickBooks, take the discount. If you're evaluating, the trial is worth more than the savings. Second, a QuickBooks Online price increase is close to an annual event, and existing subscribers get it too, usually with an email notice and a new rate on the next renewal. Budget for the standard rate, not the promo rate, and treat any first-year discount as a bonus rather than the baseline.

One more thing about how the plans are packaged: a chunk of what you're paying for at every tier is service-business features. Estimates, time tracking, progress invoicing, and mileage are useful if you quote jobs, and irrelevant if your revenue arrives as a marketplace settlement. Don't let a long feature comparison talk you into a higher tier when the only line that matters to a product seller is inventory.

• •Simple Start: single user, basic income/expense tracking, invoicing
• •Essentials: adds bill pay and multiple users
• •Plus: adds inventory tracking, budgeting, project profitability (the tier most Amazon sellers land on)
• •Advanced: custom permissions, batch operations, more granular reporting

Which tier do you actually need?

Match the tier to how your business runs, not to the feature list. A reseller with no held inventory (pure dropshipping, or digital products) can genuinely live on Simple Start or Essentials, using the money saved for a good connector. The moment you own stock (FBA shipments, a 3PL, a garage full of products), Plus becomes the practical floor, because inventory tracking and class tracking are what let your books distinguish an asset you bought from an expense you incurred.

Class and location tracking, also gated behind Plus, is the underrated feature for marketplace sellers. It lets you tag every transaction by channel (Amazon US, Amazon CA, Shopify, eBay) so your P&L can answer 'which channel actually made money last month' without exports and pivot tables. Sellers who skip this end up with one undifferentiated revenue line and no idea which platform is carrying the business.

Be realistic about what Plus buys you on the inventory side, though. Receiving inventory in QuickBooks Online works through purchase orders and item receipts, valued at average cost, and it assumes you're the one receiving the goods. It won't reconcile against Amazon's inventory ledger, won't spread freight and duties across units for you, and won't tell you what's sitting in a fulfillment center in another state. Sellers who need more than that either keep landed cost in the connector layer or add one of the QuickBooks Online inventory apps that handles purchase orders and multi-location stock properly. Either way that's another monthly line, so weigh it against the Plus upgrade rather than assuming Plus solved it.

Advanced is rarely necessary below the multi-employee stage. Its selling points (custom roles, batch entry, workflow automation, premium support) matter when several people touch the books daily. A solo seller paying for Advanced is mostly buying features they'll never open. Start at Plus, and upgrade when a specific limitation, like the user cap or report volume, actually bites. Downgrading later is possible but messier than upgrading, which is one more reason not to overbuy on day one.

What Amazon and Walmart sellers actually need beyond the base subscription

The subscription fee is rarely the real cost of running QuickBooks for an ecommerce business. Amazon settlement reports bundle sales, refunds, FBA fees, advertising spend, storage fees, and reimbursements into one lump deposit every two weeks; QuickBooks doesn't know how to split that automatically. Sellers typically need either a manual bookkeeping process (expensive in hours) or a connector app that maps each settlement line to the right account.

This matters more than it sounds like. More than half of everything sold on Amazon comes from third-party sellers, not Amazon itself, according to Amazon's own investor disclosures, meaning a huge share of QuickBooks' small-business customer base is dealing with exactly this settlement-reconciliation problem, not simple retail sales. Getting it wrong doesn't just create messy books; it distorts your actual product margins because fees and refunds get miscategorized as generic "other expense" instead of tied to specific SKUs or marketplaces.

The connector market has a few established players, each with its own monthly subscription tiered by order volume. A2X quickbooks integration is the longest-standing option; Link My Books competes directly on price. This is also the gap Amazon accounting software that syncs to QuickBooks & Xero is built to close, pulling settlement data in at the transaction level so QuickBooks reflects true unit economics, not just a lump deposit. If you sell on Shopify too, note that most connectors price each channel separately, so a shopify quickbooks integration adds its own line to the budget. When comparing, the question isn't 'does it connect amazon to quickbooks' (they all do) but whether each posted entry balances exactly to the bank deposit and whether fees land in separate accounts you can actually analyze.

Sell anywhere off the marketplaces and the app bill grows again. Integrate Square with QuickBooks Online for market-stall or pop-up sales and that's another sync to configure and reconcile; the same goes for payment processors and bill-pay tools. Intuit's app store lists thousands of Intuit-approved QuickBooks Online apps, and approval only means the integration was reviewed, not that it fits your business or that its data will be clean. Add apps one at a time, and only after the thing you're trying to fix has actually become a monthly chore.

A realistic total monthly budget (worked example)

Here's a hypothetical budget for a seller doing mid five figures a month across Amazon and Shopify, using illustrative numbers to show the shape of the spend rather than current prices. QuickBooks Online Plus: call it something in the neighborhood of $100 monthly at standard rates. A settlement connector covering two channels: typically somewhere in the tens of dollars monthly at this volume. Sales tax filing software or a filing service, if you have non-marketplace nexus: its own subscription. A part-time bookkeeper reviewing monthly, if you're not doing it yourself: commonly a few hundred dollars a month for an ecommerce-literate one.

Hire anyone and payroll becomes its own line. QuickBooks Online Payroll pricing is separate from your accounting subscription and follows a base monthly fee plus a per-employee charge, with the higher payroll tiers adding tax-filing guarantees and HR extras. Check the current rates before you budget, and note that the Intuit Online Payroll vs QuickBooks Payroll comparison you'll find in older articles is largely history now: Intuit retired the standalone Intuit Online Payroll product and moved those customers onto QuickBooks Online Payroll. Contractors are cheaper than employees here but not free, since QuickBooks Online can generate and e-file 1099s but prices that as its own service depending on your plan.

Add that up and the QuickBooks subscription is maybe a third of the real monthly cost, sometimes less. That's not an argument against QuickBooks. It's an argument for budgeting the stack, not the sticker. Sellers who budget only for QBO either skip the connector and drown in manual entry, or skip the bookkeeper and discover at tax time that a year of automated entries still needs human review.

The counterweight: compare that stack cost against the alternative, which is your own hours. If manual settlement entry takes even five hours a month and your time is worth anything, the connector pays for itself immediately. The bookkeeper question is closer and depends on how much you enjoy reconciliation. Plenty of disciplined sellers do their own monthly close in under two hours once the automation is set up.

Sales tax and 1099-K costs that show up regardless of your QBO plan

No QuickBooks tier automatically solves multi-state sales tax exposure. Since the Supreme Court's 2018 ruling in South Dakota v. Wayfair, states can require out-of-state sellers to collect tax once they cross sales or transaction thresholds: economic nexus, not just physical presence. Amazon and other marketplaces now handle collection and remittance for third-party sales in nearly every state with a sales tax, per marketplace facilitator laws tracked by the Sales Tax Institute, but you're still responsible for registering, filing, and reconciling in states where you have other nexus triggers, like inventory storage, employees, or non-marketplace sales.

FBA sellers should pay particular attention to the inventory-storage trigger. Amazon moves your stock between fulfillment centers in many states without asking you, and some states treat that stored inventory as physical nexus. Whether and how aggressively states enforce this against small FBA sellers varies, which is exactly the kind of judgment call worth a one-time consultation with a sales tax professional rather than a guess.

On top of that, 1099-K reporting thresholds have been shifting; the old flat $20,000/200-transaction rule is being phased down rather than staying fixed, according to the IRS. That means more sellers will receive 1099-Ks that need to reconcile cleanly against their QuickBooks revenue, another reason accurate, transaction-level bookkeeping matters more than which QBO tier you pick. The 1099-K shows gross payment volume before fees and refunds, so books built from net deposits will never tie out to it; books built on proper ecommerce accounting (gross sales down, fees itemized) reconcile in minutes.

The cheaper things people compare it against

Three comparisons come up constantly when sellers balk at the price, and each one trades away something specific.

FreshBooks vs QuickBooks Online is really invoicing versus accounting. FreshBooks is built around billing clients and tracking time, and it's pleasant to use for that. It has no meaningful inventory tracking, so a seller who holds stock ends up expensing purchases as they're paid for, which is the same COGS distortion Simple Start creates. Fine for a consultant. Wrong tool for a product business.

Quicken vs QuickBooks Online is an even bigger gap: Quicken is personal finance software with a small-business and rental edition bolted on, not a double-entry accounting system your accountant can pick up at year end. If your books will ever be handed to a CPA, filed as a business return, or shown to a buyer, you want the double-entry ledger.

QuickBooks Online vs Self-Employed is the one that actually saves money, and only for a specific person. The Self-Employed product targets freelancers filing a Schedule C: it separates business and personal spending, estimates quarterly taxes, and stops there. No inventory, no balance sheet, no accrual reporting. Moving up to QuickBooks Online later isn't a click either, since the data doesn't carry over cleanly and you'll rebuild the file. If you hold stock or plan to, the cheaper tier costs you a migration you'll pay for in hours.

How to keep the total cost down

Start a tier lower than you think you need only if you're pre-inventory; otherwise start at Plus and resist Advanced until a concrete limitation forces it. Ask any accountant or bookkeeper you work with about wholesale billing: many ProAdvisor accountants can put your subscription on their bill at a permanent discount that beats the public promo.

On the connector side, most tools tier pricing by monthly order volume, so don't pay for a volume band you haven't reached. Review the subscription annually; volume-based prices creep as you grow, and switching connectors is a one-afternoon job, not a migration. And whichever quickbooks for amazon sellers setup you land on, run one real settlement through a free trial before paying anything. The tool that produces a balanced journal entry matching your deposit to the penny is worth its fee; one that dumps hundreds of raw lines into your ledger costs more in cleanup than it charges in subscription.

Finally, don't cheap out by skipping the amazon quickbooks integration entirely and booking deposits as revenue. It saves a subscription and costs you accurate margins, a clean 1099-K reconciliation, and a painful catch-up project later. Of every line in the stack budget, the connector is the one that earns its keep fastest.