Melio

Melio covers accounts payable for paying vendors, contractors and business bills, accounts receivable for sending invoices and receiving payments online, and expense management with real-time receipt capture, published with a free tier requiring no credit card.

The free tier with metered ACH transfers is the commercially interesting structure, and it fits how small businesses actually pay.

A small business makes relatively few supplier payments each month, and paying them is genuinely tedious: logging into online banking, entering account details correctly, keeping a record for the accountant, and remembering which invoices are due. That work is disproportionate to the number of payments, which is why it gets batched and delayed.

Charging nothing for the first several transfers each month means the businesses with lowest volume, who are also least able to justify a subscription, can use it at no cost, while heavier users pay per transfer. The published rate beyond the free allowance is $0.50 per ACH payment, which is a small enough figure to be genuinely incidental.

Combining payables and receivables in one product matters more for small businesses than for larger ones. A finance department separates the two functions. A business owner does not: they are one person managing whether more money is coming in than going out this week, and seeing both sides in one place is the actual question they are trying to answer.

Paying vendors any way you want, as the vendor puts it, addresses the mismatch that causes most friction: the payer wants to pay by card to preserve cash flow or earn rewards, while the recipient wants a bank transfer and will not accept card fees. Bridging that lets each side use its preferred method.

Pricing is published with a free tier at $0 including five free ACH payments per month, and ACH beyond that at $0.50 each.