Setu vs Swipe: Free Invoicing Tools or a Billing Account in 2026?

Two businesses ask the same question in the same week and mean very different things by it. The first raises eleven invoices a month, all from one laptop at one desk, and wants the document to look right and carry the correct tax split. The second raises two hundred, has a second person doing it when the first is travelling, and needs last March's invoice found in four seconds during a dispute.

Swipe is built for the second. Setu's free tools are built for the first. They get shortlisted against each other constantly, because both answer a web search for free GST billing, and the honest version of this comparison is mostly about where that line sits and what it costs to be standing on the wrong side of it.

What Swipe is built to do

Swipe is a billing account. You sign up, your business details live on the vendor's servers, and the documents you raise accumulate in one place you can reach from a phone or a browser. The product covers the standard Indian billing set: GST invoices with the tax breakdown done for you, purchases, quotations and estimates, customer and vendor records, stock, payments received, expenses, and sharing a bill over WhatsApp or email rather than printing it.

The pieces that matter most are the ones a free tool structurally cannot offer. Your history is on a server, so it survives a wiped laptop and opens on a phone. Two people can be in it. And the compliance-adjacent operations — reporting an invoice to the government portal, generating an e-way bill — are the kind of thing an account-based product can do because it holds credentials and a connection, while a page running in your browser cannot.

Those are not luxuries once volume arrives. A billing history you can search is the difference between settling a customer dispute in a minute and losing an afternoon to a folder of PDFs.

What it costs, as publicly listed

Swipe publishes a free tier and two paid plans. As listed on an Indian software marketplace in October 2026, Pro works out to roughly ₹212 a month billed annually, which the listing calculates as about ₹2,542 a year excluding tax, for one business account and one user. Jet is roughly ₹297 a month billed annually, about ₹3,559 a year excluding tax, on the same one-business, one-user footing. The same listing shows a starting price of about ₹3,000 a year including GST, and the vendor's own material describes the mobile and web apps as free for lifetime use with unlimited invoices, purchases and quotations.

Two cautions on those numbers. The free-versus-paid feature line is not published in much detail, so what you actually give up by staying free is hard to read from outside — the paid tier is described as everything in free, plus more, without a clean list of what free stops at. And both paid plans use per-seat pricing, listed for one user. A second person is a second cost, which is exactly the variable a two-counter shop needs to price before signing. Check the vendor's own pricing page for the current figures before you budget; marketplace listings go stale and plan names change.

What Setu's tools do instead

Setu splits the same work into separate free browser tools with no account, no seat count and no document cap. The Invoice Generator produces a GST-formatted invoice with the tax split calculated and a PDF at the end. The Quotation Generator does the same for the document that comes before the sale. The Credit Note Generator handles the return or the correction, which is the document most small sellers improvise badly. And the Stock Register tracks what is on the shelf behind all of it.

There is no plan because there is no server holding your books. What you enter stays on the browser that entered it. That is the whole trade in one sentence: nothing to pay, nothing to sign up for, and nothing syncing anywhere.

The honest comparison

The three questions that actually decide it

Does more than one person, or more than one device, need the same running numbers? This is the cleanest split in the comparison and it is not close. A browser tool keeps its records on the browser that made them, so a phone and a counter laptop are two separate histories that will quietly disagree within a fortnight. If the answer is yes, stop reading comparisons and buy an account. If it is no, the free route costs you nothing you were going to use.

Does the e-invoicing mandate reach you? This is the question most free-tool articles skip, and it is the one that can turn a saving into a problem. The threshold set by Notification 10/2023-Central Tax is aggregate annual turnover above ₹5 crore, measured at PAN level across every registration you hold, applied from 1 August 2023. Cross it in any financial year from 2017-18 and you are in, with no exit if turnover later falls. From 1 April 2025 a further restriction stops businesses at ₹10 crore and above from uploading a document to the portal more than thirty days after its date. Some categories are carved out regardless of turnover, banks, insurers, goods transport agencies, passenger transport and a few others among them, and B2C supplies are outside the mandate altogether.

If any of that applies to you, a browser-only generator is not the tool, no matter how good the PDF looks. None of this is tax advice and the detail shifts with notifications — confirm your own position with your CA.

Who needs to find a document from last year? Not who files it — who retrieves it. If the answer is only you, and only occasionally, a dated folder of PDFs is a legitimate filing system. If the answer includes your accountant, a lender or a customer in the middle of an argument, you want the searchable version.

What free actually costs here

Both products say free, and they mean different things. Swipe's free tier is a free account: your records are still on the vendor's servers, still reachable from a second device, still there after a hardware failure, and the vendor still decides what that tier includes next year. Setu's free is free because nothing is stored for you at all — the cost is paid in single-device working and in a history you are responsible for keeping.

That distinction matters more than the price. A free account is a relationship with limits that can move. A free browser tool has no limits and no safety net. Neither is better in the abstract; they fail in different directions, and you should pick the failure you can live with.

Where each one wins

Swipe wins when billing is a daily routine rather than an occasional chore: steady document volume, a second pair of hands, a phone that needs the same data as the desk, and above all a turnover that drags you into portal reporting. The subscription stops being a cost and becomes the price of not retyping and not losing things.

Setu's tools win when the document is the job. A consultant invoicing six clients a month, a new shop that has not yet decided what its process is, a side business that cannot justify a line item, a one-counter trader who wants the tax split right and nothing else — all of these are better served by a free page that opens and works than by an account they half-use. The myBillBook comparison lands on the same line for broadly the same reason, which should tell you the line is real and not a product pitch.

One last option neither column covers. If the actual problem is not which app raises the invoice but that nobody is reconciling, categorising or closing the month behind it, then software of any price is the wrong purchase. That is what a bookkeeping service is for, and Setu's consultancy works inside whichever tool you have already chosen rather than asking you to move.