FreeAgent

FreeAgent is an Edinburgh company, bought by NatWest Group in 2018, and that ownership is the deal: if your business current account is with NatWest, Royal Bank of Scotland or Ulster Bank, or you use a Mettle account and make one transaction a month, FreeAgent costs nothing for as long as you keep the account. Everyone else pays a flat price per company rather than per user.

Prices in pounds excluding VAT, read on 8 September 2026. A limited company pays £33 a month, or £330 a year, with 50 per cent off for the first six months (£16.50) or the first year (£165). A sole trader pays £19 a month or £190 a year on the same offer. There is a 30-day trial. The product is one plan per business type with no tiers to climb: invoicing and estimates, expenses, projects and time tracking, bank feeds, cashflow, monthly payroll with RTI to HMRC, MTD VAT returns, Self Assessment filing, and Final Accounts and Corporation Tax filed from within FreeAgent. Smart Capture reads ten receipts and bills a month; unlimited is a £5 add-on, and an Amazon UK connector is £6. Customers can pay by Tyl by NatWest, Stripe, GoCardless or PayPal. Accounts on the cash basis do not get stock or payroll.

HMRC lists FreeAgent twice on its Making Tax Digital for Income Tax list, once as the paid product and once as "FreeAgent for free with Mettle, NatWest and RBS", and on the VAT list. Support is by UK-based support accountants online or over the phone, and the accountant sits in the account as a named user role; a practice programme gives accountants their own dashboard. The API is REST with OAuth 2.0 across 58 resource types including payroll, and there is a developer forum; there is no official MCP server, only a cluster of community ones on GitHub. Trustpilot is 4.6 on 3,006 invited reviews, 82 per cent five-star, with the one recent one-star we found complaining that FreeAgent let through an invalid CT600 in a charity-donation edge case.

The limits are the flip side of the simplicity. There is no plan above the flat one, so multi-user permissions, multi-currency and inventory are what they are; the product is aimed at the owner-managed company with a handful of staff, not the one heading for a finance team. Data location and security certifications are not stated on the pages we could read, and the receipt cap will annoy anyone with more than ten bills a month.

In our experience: we used FreeAgent years ago and found it basic and limited, aimed at the very small business and the self-employed. The product on the page today has grown a long way from that (payroll, Corporation Tax filing, projects), and the profile above reflects what it is now rather than what we remember. Saaskly has no affiliate link for FreeAgent.