If you’ve been pricing up a trade business app this week, the lay of the land is: Tradify is £34 per user per month, Powered Now starts at £28/month, ServiceM8 is free to 30 jobs a month then £25, and QuickBooks starts at £10/month, with CIS from £16. If you’re a sole trader or small operator, that’s not small money. £336–£408 a year, before VAT, before you’ve sent an invoice.
There are genuinely free options. Here’s an honest look at what’s out there, what they actually cover, and where the paid tools still earn their money.
The three kinds of “free”
Not all free is the same. When you’re evaluating free trade software, check which bucket it’s in:
- Free trial. Free for 14 or 30 days, then you’re billed. Useful to try something, not a long-term plan.
- Free tier, capped. You get limited features or a number of invoices before paywalls kick in. Fine if the cap is generous; frustrating if it’s 5 invoices a month.
- Free, full product. The core product is free forever; the business model is paid upgrades or transaction fees rather than subscriptions. Yoley is in this bucket: free forever, with no paid upgrades — you only pay a card processing fee (from 0.99% + 5p) when a customer pays by card.
What’s actually free in 2026
Yoley (free, full product)
Yoley is free and includes unlimited quotes and invoices, expenses with on-device receipt OCR, job diary with weather forecast, customer CRM, CIS subcontractor management with UTR and deduction rates, payment links, HMRC SA103 category mapping, kit bundles, Face ID protection and CloudKit sync. The only cost is the card processing fee on your own Monek Processing Account — from 0.99% + 5p, only paid when you collect card payments, which you’d pay through any other app too (usually more). There’s no paid plan, no trial and no in-app purchases. Tap to Pay on iPhone is coming soon.
Limitations: phone-only (Android in beta testing, no web), single-user, no direct MTD VAT submission, no two-way Xero sync (CSV/PDF export only).
Wave (free)
Wave offers free invoicing and accounting globally, and it’s legitimately free. It’s accounting-first rather than trades-first — so no job diary, no quotes aimed at trades, no CIS deduction handling. Good for the invoicing piece, less good for the daily trade workflow.
Zoho Invoice (free up to a cap)
Zoho offers a free Invoice tier. It’s competent at invoicing for small operators but isn’t UK trade-specific — no CIS, no SA103, no trade-specific templates — and the free tier is capped by customer count.
Spreadsheets + Word templates (free)
Still the “system” many sole traders use. Genuinely free, but the admin cost is high: hand-typed numbers, no automatic VAT maths, no way for customers to accept or pay online. For 3–5 jobs a week, modern free apps like Yoley will pay for themselves in time alone.
Where the paid tools still earn their money
The paid products are mature and broad. If you need any of the following, the paid tools are probably worth what they charge:
- Multi-user teams with shared diaries and roles. Tradify, Powered Now and ServiceM8 all do this well; Yoley is single-user today.
- A finished Android app. Yoley’s Android version is in beta testing. If your team needs a settled Android app today, you need something else for now.
- Deep two-way Xero/QuickBooks integration. Powered Now and Tradify have this; Yoley exports to CSV/PDF.
- Direct MTD submissions. QuickBooks handles MTD VAT natively; most trade apps don’t.
- Custom forms engines. ServiceM8 is strong here for compliance forms (gas-safe, fire safety, etc.).
The practical recommendation for a sole trader
If you’re a UK sole trader or tiny team (1–2 people), all on iPhone, with a typical sole-trader workflow (quotes, invoices, expenses, the occasional CIS deduction, card payments), you don’t need £28–£34 a month of software. Yoley covers the core workflow free. Pair it with an accountant at year-end and you’re done.
If you’re a 3+ person operation with shared scheduling or deep accounting integration needs, Powered Now or Tradify is probably a better fit — and yes, the monthly fee is worth it for those scenarios.