Expensify costs $5/user/mo — and unlike a tool you buy once, that bill never stops. Over three years that's roughly $180 for software doing a job your own hardware could just as easily do.
Where the subscription actually goes
$5/user/mo ($60/user/yr) is the sticker price. It compounds: cancel and you typically lose access to your own history, and most plans ratchet the price up as you add usage, seats or storage — the bill rarely stays flat for long.
Ledgerly: the pay-once alternative
Ledgerly does the same core job for $29, once. Expenses, budgets, multi-currency, recurring templates and in-browser receipt OCR — no cloud, no per-seat fee.
| Ledgerly | Expensify | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | $29 once | $5/user/mo ($60/user/yr) |
| Receipt OCR | Local, in-browser, free forever | Cloud |
| Your receipts leave your machine | Never | Yes — their cloud |
| Multi-currency with rate history | Included | Paid tier |
| Recurring expenses | Included | Paid tier |
| Budgets with alerts | Included | Paid tier |
| Cost over 3 years (solo) | $29 | $180 |
| Cancel and keep your history? | Nothing to cancel — it's your SQLite file | Cancel = lose access |
Pays for itself vs Expensify in about 6 months for a solo user — faster with every additional team member, since there's no per-seat fee.
Is the subscription ever still worth it?
If you need Expensify's specific ecosystem, integrations or managed infrastructure and that's genuinely load-bearing for you, the subscription earns its keep — that's a real trade-off, not a trick. Ledgerly is for everyone else: people paying every month for a job that runs fine on hardware they already own.
Try Ledgerly — $29, once
Expenses, budgets, multi-currency, recurring templates and in-browser receipt OCR — no cloud, no per-seat fee.