Balaana is accounting and invoicing software for people who run a business on their own, or with one or two others. The core of it — invoicing, expenses, clients and GST tracking — is free, permanently, for everyone. This page explains how that works, because "free" without an explanation usually means you are the product.

The problem we started with

Australia has roughly 1.5 million sole traders. Most of them need to do four things: send an invoice, chase it, keep receipts, and hand something coherent to an accountant once a quarter. The software sold to them is built for companies that also run payroll, hold inventory, manage approvals and consolidate across entities — and it is priced for those companies too.

So a landscaper with eleven clients pays a monthly subscription for a general ledger they will never look at, and a great many of them give up and go back to a spreadsheet and a shoebox. That is the gap Balaana is built for.

How a free plan pays for itself

Two ways, and neither of them is your data.

  • Plus subscriptions. $7 a month for people who want Balaana to collect payments, connect a bank feed, or give a bookkeeper a login. Most businesses reach that point eventually; none of them are forced to.
  • Payment transaction fees. When a client pays through a Balaana invoice, the payment provider takes a fee. That is the natural place for a business like this to earn, because it only charges when you have actually been paid.

What we do not do: sell or share your financial records, run advertising against your books, or lock your data in so that leaving is expensive. Every plan exports to CSV and PDF.

What Balaana deliberately does not do

Keeping the free plan sustainable means keeping the product narrow. Balaana does not do payroll, inventory, multi-currency, job costing or consolidated group reporting. If you need those, you have outgrown us and you should use something built for it — we would rather say so here than after you have moved your books across.

Balaana is also not a tax agent. It prepares your figures and lays them out against the boxes your BAS asks for; you or your registered agent lodge it.

Where we are up to

Balaana is in early access and being built in the open with the people on the list. If you sign up you will get an invite as spots open, and we will ask you what is missing. That feedback is genuinely shaping what gets built next — at this size, it is the only sensible way to build.

Frequently asked questions

Balaana is a small independent Australian software team building one product. We are not venture-funded and we are not a side project of a larger accounting firm, which is why the roadmap is narrow and the pricing is not designed to grow into an enterprise contract.

Your records are stored on Australian infrastructure and encrypted in transit and at rest. You can export everything to CSV or PDF at any time on any plan, and deleting your account deletes your records.

No. Balaana is bookkeeping software. It prepares the figures for your BAS and income tax, but lodgement is done by you or by a registered tax or BAS agent. Nothing on this site is personal tax advice.