Akaunting

The licence says something the marketing does not

Akaunting’s own pages describe it as “online, open source and free accounting software”. The file in its repository is Business Source Licence 1.1, and its additional use grant reads:

You may make production use of the Licensed Work, provided you do not use it in any of the following ways: (1) Use the Licensed Work with a total of more than two users or one company or one thousand invoices.

So the free download is free for production use up to two users, one company and 1,000 invoices. Past that, you need one of the on-premise plans - which is a legitimate business model, and not what “open source” means. Two further restrictions in the same grant: you may not remove the branding to ship a rebranded version, and you may not run it as an “Accounting Service” for third parties.

Each version does become open source eventually. The change date is four years from publication, and the change licence is GPLv3, so today’s release is GPLv3 in 2030 while today’s terms are BSL.

We record this because it is the sort of thing a comparison page repeats from a vendor’s homepage without checking. Ours checked.

Double-entry is an app you buy

The other thing to price before assuming the free build is a ledger: double-entry accounting is a separate purchase. The app store lists Double-Entry - chart of accounts, balance sheet, general ledger, trial balance, manual journals - at $72 a year.

Without it, a self-hosted Akaunting is an invoicing and expense tracker. With it, the honest cost of keeping three people’s books on your own server is:

Item	A year
On-premise Premium licence, 10 users	$72
Double-Entry app	$72
Total	$144

That is still the cheapest multi-user option in our accounting guide - under Zoho Books at $180 a year and well under Xero at $300 - and it is the figure that guide’s cost model uses, rather than the nothing the download implies.

Cloud, or your own server, at different prices

The two routes are priced separately and the cloud plans explicitly do not apply to a self-hosted install.

Plan	On-premise	Cloud, billed yearly
Standard, 1 user + accountant	Free	$8 a month
Premium, 10 users	$72 a year, or $756 lifetime	$24 a month
Elite, 30 users	$168 a year, or $1,764 lifetime	$56 a month
Ultimate, unlimited	$684 a year, or $7,224 lifetime	$145 a month

The lifetime licences are unusual and worth noting: nothing else in our accounting comparison sells one. At a $756 one-off, on-premise Premium pays for itself against its own $72 annual price in ten and a half years, which is a long bet on a vendor whose location, founding date and funding are not published.

On the cloud tiers, double-entry, bank feeds, expense claims, roles and the client portal are listed as included from Premium, so the app-store purchase is a self-hosting concern rather than a universal one.

What is missing

• Payroll that files taxes. The Payroll app makes pay calendars and print-ready payslips at $60 a year. It does not file with a tax authority. Wave charges $40 a month plus $6 an employee and files in all fifty US states.
• Bank feeds on the free build. They arrive with Premium.
• Support. Community forum on Standard, ticket support once you pay.
• A published company. No location, no founding date, no funding, though the pricing page says the company has served hundreds of thousands of businesses since 2017.

What we have not done

Nobody here has installed Akaunting, run a month through it, or tested a single bank feed. What is checked is the two price lists, two app listings and the licence file - read on 19 August 2026. The licence reading is the part of this profile we would most want someone to check for themselves, because it contradicts the vendor’s own description, and the file is one click away.