Bills, travel and receipts: three tools that each meter you differently
None of these three charges you per seat, and that is the most important thing about them.
Money leaves a small company through three doors: supplier invoices, trips, and the pile of receipts that arrives afterwards. The tools here each stand at one of those doors. They overlap less than their marketing suggests, and the interesting comparison is not feature lists but where each one starts charging.
All three break the usual per-seat pattern, which is good news for a growing team and bad news for anyone trying to forecast the bill from a pricing page. A free tier that meters transactions can be cheaper than a paid tier for years, and then stop being cheaper in a single busy month.
How we picked
- Figures come from the vendor’s own page, with the date we read them. Where a vendor publishes nothing, we say that rather than guessing.
- We name the unit being metered, because with these three the unit is the whole story.
- We say who should skip each one — in this category the most common mistake is buying a second tool that duplicates something your accounting software already does.
The picks
Starts genuinely free and charges by transaction rather than by month, which makes it the low-commitment way to move accounts payable out of a bank portal. The thing to check before adopting it is whether your accounting software already does bill-pay: if it does, a second tool mostly adds another place to look.
Skip it if you already run AP through robust accounting software with bill-pay built in — a second tool adds little
Visit Melio →Read our full Melio review →The travel booking itself carries no fee, which is unusual enough to be worth stating plainly. Navan publishes no price list for the wider product, and we could not retrieve one in either July or August 2026, so anything beyond the free booking layer is a conversation rather than a number.
Skip it if your travel volume is a few trips a year (any booking site does), or you need expense-only tooling without the travel layer
Visit Navan →Read our full Navan review →Has moved away from named tiers entirely: you pick a region and a billing period and slide an allowance. That makes it hard to compare on a headline price and easy to size honestly — count the receipts and invoices you process in a normal month, and read the price off that.
Skip it if you're a sole trader with few receipts (pricey for low volume), or you want all-in-one accounting — Dext only does the capture layer
Visit Dext →Read our full Dext review →Compared at a glance
| Tool | What it meters | Pricing, as we read it |
|---|---|---|
| Melio | per payment | A free Go plan, $0 forever, with 5 free ACH payments a month and $0.50 for each one after that. read 2026-08-17 |
| Navan | free to book, paid for the extras | Navan publishes no price list, re-verified 2026-08-17: the pricing URL is a marketing page and neither our July nor our August 2026 capture retrieved an amount. read 2026-08-17 |
| Dext | per document allowance | Dext has moved off named tiers: you choose a region and a billing period, then slide an allowance. read 2026-08-21 |
A free tier is a meter, not a gift
Two of the three tools here start at nothing, and in both cases the free plan is a metered plan with the meter set generously. That is a perfectly fair arrangement, but it means the question to ask is not ‘what does it cost’ but ‘what happens at volume’ — and the answer should come from your own transaction count, not from the tier the vendor marks Popular.
The second thing worth checking is where the data lands. A capture tool that does not push cleanly into the ledger you already keep has moved the work rather than removed it.
Frequently asked questions
Do I need a bill-pay tool if my accounting software has one?
Usually not. The case for a separate tool is approval workflow, paying suppliers who want a method your ledger does not support, or getting payments out of a single person’s bank login — not the payment itself.
Why is travel booking free?
Because the booking is not where the money is. Travel platforms earn on the supplier side and on the expense and card products they attach, which is why the free layer can be genuinely free and the rest is quote-only.
What should I count before buying a receipt tool?
Documents per month, not users. These tools price on volume, so a five-person firm processing three hundred invoices pays more than a twenty-person firm processing forty.
Free tools for this decision
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Some links on this page are affiliate links: if you sign up we may earn a commission, at no cost to you, and it never changes what we write. Every figure above was read on the vendor’s own page on the date shown.