Wave: Free for 10 Years, Then $16/Month Overnight

Wave was the last truly free accounting tool for small businesses. For over a decade, it offered free invoicing, expense tracking, bank connections, and receipt scanning. Millions of freelancers, solopreneurs, and micro-businesses built their financial workflows around Wave's "free forever" promise. Then H&R Block acquired Wave for $405 million in June 2019 — and the bill came due.

Starting January 2024, Wave moved its most-used features behind a $16/month Pro paywall. Automatic bank imports, receipt scanning, and full automation — the features that made Wave actually useful for day-to-day accounting — now require a paid subscription. The free tier still exists technically, but it's limited to manual entry only. For businesses that relied on Wave's automation, the choice was stark: pay $192/year or rebuild your entire financial workflow somewhere else.

This is the acquisition playbook in action: acquire a beloved free product, let existing users get deeper into the ecosystem, then monetize. H&R Block paid $405 million for Wave's user base and needed to recoup that investment. The users who built businesses on "free forever" were the product being sold. For a typical Wave user, the $192/year bill might seem small — but over three years that's $576, and there's no guarantee prices won't increase again. H&R Block has quarterly earnings targets to hit.