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.
None of the three is a plain per-seat tool — Melio and Dext meter volume, and Navan charges only for people who actually file expenses — 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 — five ACH payments a month on the Go plan, then a fee per payment — with a paid Core plan from $20 a month billed annually. That 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 on Navan Business, for companies of up to 300 employees, which is unusual enough to be worth stating plainly. Navan Expense is free for the first five users who file in a month and then $15 per filing user a month; above 300 employees the plan is quoted (read 24 September 2026). The free booking is funded by supplier commission, so check route and hotel prices against what you would pay elsewhere.
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 2026-10-07 |
| Navan | free to book, paid for the extras | Navan Business is free for companies of up to 300 employees, with no limit on trips, and Navan Expense is free for the first 5 monthly expensing users and then $15 per user per month. read 2026-09-24 |
| Dext | per document allowance | The base of 250 documents a month and 5 users costs $25.21 per month billed annually ($302.50 a year) or $31.50 monthly in the Rest of the World, £30 monthly in the UK, €31.50 in the EU and A$42 in APAC, all excluding tax. 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 commission on the supplier side and charge for the expense and card products they attach, which is why the booking layer can be genuinely free. At Navan the expense product is billed per user who files, after the first five.
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.