HiBill's pricing fits in a sentence: the core is free forever, and Pro exists for when you outgrow the metered extras. But "free forever" earns skepticism these days, so this post spells out exactly where the line sits — what's capped on Free, what's metered, the precise numbers, and the honest signals that you'd get your $4.99 a month's worth from Pro.
The philosophy: capability is free, capacity is paid
HiBill doesn't gate features behind the paywall. Everything the app does — splitting, settling, groups, multi-currency, search — works identically on both plans. What Pro changes is capacity: how much storage you have, how many AI receipt scans and AI sentence reads you get each month, and how high the account caps sit.
Concretely, free forever includes:
Unlimited transactions, and room for 2,000 placeholder people and 200 groups. Those caps sit far above everyday use — you will not hit a wall at your fiftieth expense or your tenth friend.
Every split type. Evenly, by exact amounts, by percentage, by items with tax and tip allocation, multiple payers, share-by-link claiming. All of it, free.
Groups. Create them, share the QR, connect whole trips and households.
All supported currencies — USD, EUR, GBP and about 35 more — with per-currency balances.
Placeholders and merges for tracking people who haven't joined yet.
Search across your transactions.
Debt simplification, reminders, notes, categories — the whole toolkit.
1 GB of file storage (10 MB per file) for receipts and attachments.
5 AI receipt scans and 50 AI sentence reads per month.
Community support.
There's no card required, and the free tier isn't a demo or a time-limited trial — for a lot of people it's simply the product.
What Pro changes
Pro is $4.99/month and raises the metered ceilings, substantially:
Free | Pro | |
|---|---|---|
AI receipt scans | 5 / month | 100 / month |
AI sentence reads | 50 / month | 1,000 / month |
Total storage | 1 GB | 10 GB |
Max file size | 10 MB | 100 MB |
Support | Community | Priority |
Placeholder people | 2,000 | 20,000 |
Groups | 200 | 2,000 |
Everything else carries over unchanged — Pro contains everything in Free.
Note what's not in the table: there are no group plans and no per-seat pricing. One subscription covers your entire sharing life, and the people you split with don't need Pro — or even accounts — for you to use yours. If you're the one who scans every receipt for the household, you're the only one who needs to pay.
The metered things, explained
AI receipt scans are the photograph-a-receipt feature: attach a bill in the sentence field, mark it as a Bill, and HiBill reads the total, currency, date and line items into a review for you to check before you add it. Each bill read counts against the monthly allowance, which resets every month. AI sentence reads work the same way: every press of Read in the sentence field uses one, whether or not a bill is attached. The full form never touches either meter — the meter is on the convenience, not the capability.
Storage covers the files you attach: receipt photos, bill images, documents. Free's 1 GB holds a lot of receipt photos; the 10 MB per-file cap is roomy for photos but can pinch on large PDFs or high-resolution scans, which is what Pro's 100 MB per-file limit addresses.
Honest signals you'd benefit from Pro
Upgrade when the meters actually bind, not before:
You add more than about 50 transactions a month by sentence. Every sentence you read uses one of Free's 50 AI reads; Pro's 1,000 cover a busy household or a long trip with room to spare.
You hit the scan wall monthly. Five scans covers the occasional gnarly restaurant bill. If scanning is your default entry method — every grocery run, every bill — you'll exhaust five in a week, and 100/month is effectively "scan everything."
You attach files to most transactions. Long-running households and trips accumulate attachments; if you're the group's archivist, 1 GB eventually fills.
You attach big files. Multi-page PDF invoices and high-res scans that exceed 10 MB simply need the Pro cap.
You want priority support.
Equally honest signals you don't need Pro yet: you add a few dozen transactions a month, attachments are occasional, and you've never seen either limit. When reads run out, the form still works, unlimited. The free tier is not a nag machine — nothing about your existing data degrades, and your ledger is never held hostage.
Common questions
Do the people I split with need Pro? No. Plans are individual, and your Pro-scanned expenses split with free users (and with placeholders who have no account at all) exactly the same way.
What happens to my data if I downgrade? Your transactions and balances stay exactly as they are, so the ledger itself is unaffected. Storage and scan allowances drop to free-tier levels going forward — if you're over the storage limit, you'll be prompted to get back under it rather than losing anything silently.
Is there a contract? No — Pro is billed monthly, and you can cancel whenever you like.
Are unused scans carried over? No; the allowance resets monthly.
Where does payment happen? Through the app — the current Pro price is always shown live on the pricing page.
The bottom line
Free is the full product with modest meters: 5 scans, 50 sentence reads, 1 GB. Pro is the same product with the meters effectively removed: 100 scans, 1,000 sentence reads, 10 GB, 100 MB files, $4.99 flat. Start free — everyone does — and let the read and scan counters make the upgrade decision for you. If you never hit it, you were right to stay free, and HiBill is fine with that.
Continue reading
How HiBill Works: A Quiet Ledger for the Money Between Friends — the whole product in one read, on either plan.
How to Split Expenses with AI: Type What Happened, Check It, Done — what one AI sentence read does for you.
Managing your subscription — how to upgrade, cancel or resume, and what happens to your data.