QuickBooks Online runs four subscription tiers, Simple Start, Essentials, Plus, and Advanced, priced per month and increasing with each tier's added features: more users, inventory tracking, project profitability, and deeper reporting. Payroll, QuickBooks Payments, and most third-party apps are separate charges on top of whichever plan you pick. Intuit changes list prices and runs promotions often, so treat the figures below as the current shape, not a locked-in number, and check the live pricing page before you commit.
1. Simple Start. The entry tier: one user, invoicing, expense tracking, basic reports, and a connected bank feed. No bill pay workflow and no multiple users, which is where most businesses outgrow it first.
2. Essentials. Adds bill management, multiple users (typically up to three), and time tracking. This is usually where a business lands once more than one person needs to touch the books.
3. Plus. Adds inventory tracking, project profitability tracking, budgeting, and more users again. This is the tier most product-based or project-based small businesses actually need.
4. Advanced. The top tier: significantly more users, custom user permissions, more detailed reporting and dashboards, batch invoicing, and dedicated account support. Priced well above the others, built for a business that's outgrown the lower tiers' reporting and user limits.
5. Add-ons sit outside all four tiers. Payroll (Core, Premium, or Elite) is its own subscription billed alongside the base plan, not included in any tier. QuickBooks Payments charges per-transaction processing fees rather than a flat monthly add-on. Most third-party integrations and some premium support options are separate again.
The subscription fee is the easy number to find. The cost that doesn't show up on the pricing page is the time spent working around what a given tier doesn't do: someone exporting a report to Excel every week because Advanced-level dashboards weren't worth the price jump, or a business staying on Essentials and manually tracking inventory in a spreadsheet instead of upgrading to Plus.
That tradeoff is usually made once, when someone picks a plan, and then never revisited even as the business changes shape around it. A company that started as a one-person shop on Simple Start can end up three years later with five people still sharing one login because nobody went back to check whether Essentials would have actually paid for itself in time saved.
The right tier is less about the sticker price and more about which manual workaround it lets you stop doing. A $30-a-month jump that eliminates two hours of spreadsheet work a week is usually a better deal than it looks on the pricing table.
The spreadsheet someone maintains because a lower tier doesn't track something natively, inventory, project costs, multi-entity reporting, gets replaced with a direct connection instead of a manual export-and-rebuild habit.
For a business running multiple QuickBooks company files to work around a plan's limits, we connect them so reporting and data don't have to be stitched together by hand across logins.
Two patterns, not the whole list. Tell us what you're doing by hand because of a plan limitation, and we'll tell you if it's actually cheaper to automate than to upgrade.
Tell us what you're working around on your current plan, and we'll tell you honestly whether an upgrade solves it or whether it's a manual process that needs fixing regardless of which tier you're on. Pricing tiers are just one lever; whatever's actually eating time in your business is worth the same conversation.
Let's talk →Most small businesses land on Essentials or Plus, since Simple Start's single-user limit and lack of bill management are usually the first things a growing business runs into. Which one depends on whether you need inventory or project tracking; if you don't, Essentials is often enough.
QuickBooks Payments charges a per-transaction processing fee rather than a flat monthly cost, and the rate depends on how the payment is taken (card entered manually, card swiped or tapped, or ACH bank transfer, which is typically cheapest). Check the current rate card on Intuit's site since these percentages do change.
Desktop is usually sold as an annual license rather than Online's monthly subscription, and the two aren't priced on the same scale or directly comparable feature for feature. Desktop also has its own separate Payroll and Enterprise pricing, distinct from Online's Payroll tiers.
Not directly. Each tier comes with a set user limit built into its price rather than a true per-seat charge; once you need more users than your tier allows, the fix is moving up a tier rather than paying an incremental per-user fee.