Choose Wave if…
- You need bookkeeping: expenses, reconciliation, a profit and loss, something your accountant can open at year end
- Invoicing is the whole of what you need software for, and you would rather pay per transaction than per month
- You already run your books in Wave and only want invoices to land in the same place
Choose North if…
- The invoice is the last step of a deal you also need drafted: the proposal, the price, the contract, the room the client signs in
- You want your card payments on your own Stripe account, with no percentage taken by the tool on top of Stripe's fee
- You want to be told the moment a client opens the invoice, and to have the reminder written for you when it goes late
- You want your own branding on the document on the free plan, without an upgrade to remove anyone else's
Wave pricing, as checked
| Plan | Price | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Starter | Free | unlimited invoices, estimates, bills and bookkeeping records |
| Pro | $19/mo | or $190 a year; waives the 60¢ on the first ten card transactions a month |
| Card payments | 2.9% + 60¢ | 3.4% + 60¢ for American Express; online payments are an add-on |
| Wave Advisors | from $149/mo | bookkeeping and coaching services |
Wave figures fetched from its pricing page on 29 August 2026. Whether the free plan leaves Wave's branding on the invoice could not be confirmed from the pricing page and is not claimed here. North, for the same table: everything is free while it is in beta. At launch, Free is $0 forever (unlimited proposals drafted from your notes, contracts with e-signing, the client deal room with your own branding, unlimited invoices sent and tracked and marked paid by hand, reminders drafted for you, full export) and Pro is $39/month (your client pays by card on your own Stripe account, delivery stages, deposits and milestones, retainers, euros and pounds, the money view). Accounts that exist before launch keep $20/month for as long as they exist. North takes no cut of any payment, at any volume, ever; Stripe's own processing fee is Stripe's.
Two different problems
Wave is accounting software that invoices. Its free plan is unusually generous for bookkeeping, and if the thing keeping you up is the books, it is a better answer than anything on this site. North does not do books at all. What it does is the part upstream of the invoice: turning a client call into a scoped proposal with three defended prices, drafting the contract to travel with it, giving the client a room to accept and sign and pay in, and only then drafting the invoice from the work that was delivered. Plenty of freelancers will run both, with North producing the invoice and Wave recording it.
What a card payment costs on each
Wave's online payments cost 2.9% plus sixty cents a transaction on the free plan; Pro removes the sixty cents on the first ten transactions a month for $19 a month. North's card payments run on your own Stripe account, so Stripe's ordinary fee applies and North adds nothing, on the free plan and on Pro at $39. Which is cheaper depends entirely on your volume and on Stripe's rate in your country, and it is a sum worth doing with your own numbers rather than trusting either company's headline.
Where Wave wins outright
Bookkeeping, and the price of it. North has no expenses, no categories, no reconciliation and no profit and loss, and does not intend to add them. It exports everything in one file for your accountant, which is a different thing from being your accountant's tool. If invoicing is genuinely all you need from software, Wave's free plan does it for nothing but the transaction fee, and this page would rather say that than pretend otherwise.
Common questions
- Is North a Wave alternative?
- For invoicing, partly: both send and track invoices for free, and both can take card payments. For bookkeeping, no; North has none and Wave is built around it. The honest framing is that North is the tool for the deal that produces the invoice, and Wave is the tool for the ledger the invoice ends up in. They overlap on one document and nowhere else.
- Which is cheaper for card payments, North or Wave?
- It depends on your volume and your country. Wave charges 2.9% plus sixty cents per transaction on its free plan (29 August 2026), and $19 a month on Pro waives the sixty cents on the first ten transactions. North charges nothing per transaction; Stripe's own fee applies on your own account, and card payment is part of Pro at $39/month. Ten payments a month of a few thousand dollars each and the two land close; the sum is yours to do.
- Can I use North with Wave?
- Yes, and for a freelancer who needs bookkeeping that is probably the right shape: North drafts the proposal, the contract and the invoice, the client pays into your Stripe, and the payment and the invoice get recorded in Wave for your accounts. North exports every invoice as data, so nothing has to be retyped.