indiAccounting Is Here: Accounting You Buy Once and Own Forever

When Intuit raised QuickBooks Online prices again this May — the largest single increase in the product’s history — it put a fine point on something I’ve believed for a long time: somewhere along the way, the software industry decided your own financial records should be a recurring revenue stream for someone else.

Think about what a cloud accounting subscription actually is. You do the work of recording your business’s finances. The vendor keeps a copy on their servers. And every month, you pay for continued access to numbers you entered yourself. Stop paying, and you can lose the ability to open your own books — wages you’ve already paid, filings you’re legally required to produce. That isn’t a tool. It’s a toll booth on your own data.

I built indiAccounting because I think that’s backwards.

Buy it once. Own it forever.

indiAccounting is full double-entry accounting for small business, and it costs $249 — one time. The optional indiPayroll module is a $299 add-on, so complete accounting and payroll comes to $548 total, once, with no monthly fee and no per-employee charges.

For comparison, the closest equivalent — QuickBooks Online Plus with payroll — now runs a small business around $2,500 a year, every year, and climbing. indiAccounting with payroll pays for itself in under three months and costs nothing after that. When the next price-increase email goes out, it won’t be addressed to you.

And “own it” means what it says. Your records stay yours under every circumstance — historical data, reports, W-2s, tax summaries — whether or not you ever pay another cent. There’s no tier limit, no lapsed subscription, nothing that can lock you out of work you’ve already done.

Your books never leave your machine

This is the part I care about most. indiAccounting is local-first: your data lives on your computer, not on my servers. There’s no account to create, no telemetry, no tracking, and no cloud sync you’re forced into. The license key itself is cryptographically signed and verifies entirely offline — the software never has to call home to confirm it’s licensed.

For sensitive fields like Social Security and bank account numbers, there’s optional full-database encryption (AES-GCM), an app-level PIN lock, and integrity-verified local backups. The design goal was simple: trusting me shouldn’t be a requirement. Privacy policies can change. Architecture doesn’t.

Everything a small business actually uses

Under the hood it’s a complete system: double-entry bookkeeping with a full chart of accounts and audit trail; invoicing, estimates, and recurring billing; accounts receivable and payable, purchase orders, and payment reminders; bank and credit-card reconciliation with CSV, QFX, and OFX import — plus SimpleFIN for direct bank connections without a cloud middleman; inventory, time, mileage, and project tracking with profitability analysis; sales-tax handling; multi-currency; and a full stack of financial reports — profit & loss, balance sheet, cash flow, budget-vs-actual, aging, and more.

indiPayroll is built to take compliance seriously: federal withholding following IRS Publication 15-T, FICA, FUTA, and SUTA, all 50 states plus DC, W-2s, quarterly 941s, annual 940s, and 1099-NEC contractor reporting — with every pay run posting to the general ledger as proper double-entry journal entries. It also covers the things that usually mean buying yet another product: retirement plans with employer match, pre-tax benefits, multi-state employees, S-Corp owner health insurance, and certified payroll with prevailing-wage and Davis-Bacon reporting for government contractors.

And if you’re coming from somewhere else, switching is built in. Importers for QuickBooks, FreshBooks, Wave, Sage, and Zoho Books bring your customers, vendors, items, accounts, invoices, and bills across — with duplicate detection — so leaving a subscription doesn’t mean starting from a blank page.

Linux-first, and available now

indiAccounting is built in Rust and runs natively on the Linux desktop. You can install it today on Flathub, or download it directly from indomitusgroup.com. There’s a 30-day free trial with full features, no credit card needed to start.

This is the same principle behind indiPDF, our one-time-purchase PDF editor: software you buy should be software you own. indiAccounting is the next piece of indiSuite — and it won’t be the last. We’re building tools for people who’d rather own their software, and their data, than rent it.

If that’s you, welcome. Your books are yours again.