Self-serve AP automation
Self-Serve AP Automation Software: Buy AP Automation Without a Demo, With Published Pricing
Try it now, capture a real invoice
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Self-serve AP automation software is AP software you can price, buy and start using without booking a sales call. Four vendors in this category publish complete pricing and let you sign up directly: AutoPayables, BILL, Ramp and Melio. The rest, including Stampli, Medius, Coupa, SAP Concur, Esker, Basware, Quadient AP, AvidXchange, Ottimate, Rillion and Factura.ai, require a demo or a quote request before you can see a number. The table below records exactly what each vendor's own site publishes.
4 of 17
AP vendors we checked that publish full pricing and let you sign up directly
8 to 12 weeks
Go-live window Medius publishes for its own AP platform
404
What esker.com/pricing and ottimate.com/pricing both return
20 invoices
Your one-time trial here before you choose a plan
Accounting sync
What you get without a sales call
The whole invoice-to-approval workflow, running on your own invoices within minutes of signing up.
AI capture on your first upload
Upload a PDF or forward it to your intake address. Vendor, invoice number, PO number, dates, currency, tax, totals and every line item come back as a draft bill with a confidence score on each extraction.
Line-level GL coding
Every invoice line carries its own GL account, so a mixed supplier invoice splits across as many accounts as it needs instead of landing in one catch-all code.
Duplicate checks before approval
Three checks run on every bill: the exact file hash, the same vendor and invoice number after normalizing punctuation and case, then the same vendor, amount and date when no number was captured. Set it to warn or to block.
Two and three-way PO matching
A bill is matched to its purchase order on vendor and amount within a tolerance percent you choose, and becomes a three-way match once quantities are received against the PO lines. A variance can optionally block approval.
Export in four real import layouts
Approved, coded bills go out as QuickBooks Online Bills, Xero Bills, NetSuite Vendor Bill or a Sage purchase invoice file. No connector project, no middleware to license.
A price you can put in a budget
$49 a month for 200 invoices, $149 a month for unlimited. One price per account rather than per seat, so adding occasional approvers costs nothing.
From decision to first captured invoice
Four steps, all of them yours to run.
Create an account
No demo request, no discovery call, no scoping questionnaire. You are in the product immediately.
Send one real invoice through
Use your ugliest supplier PDF, not a clean sample. Upload it or forward it to your intake address and read the extracted fields back against what you would have typed.
Set your GL accounts, vendors and threshold
Load the accounts you actually code to, add vendors with tax ID and 1099 flag, and pick the dollar amount above which a bill waits for approval.
Run a week of real volume, then pick a plan
Your first 20 invoices are a one-time trial. Judge the tool on your own coding accuracy before any card is charged.
The quote-only buying process vs starting today
Same goal, two very different calendars.
Buying a quote-only AP platform
- Fill in a demo request form and wait for a rep to call back
- Sit through a discovery call before you learn any price
- Evaluate on a curated demo dataset the vendor controls
- Price depends on volume, entities, modules and connector scope
- Eight to twelve weeks to go live, longer across multiple ERPs
- A statement of work and an implementation fee before invoice one
Starting with AutoPayables
- Create an account and upload an invoice in the same sitting
- Read the price on the pricing page: $49 or $149 a month
- Evaluate on your own supplier invoices from day one
- One published price per account, regardless of how many approvers you add
- First captured invoice within minutes of signing up
- First 20 invoices as a one-time trial, then a monthly plan
Who should buy this way
Self-serve suits a specific shape of company. It is worth checking you are that shape.
One entity, one ledger, a coding problem
A single company running QuickBooks, Xero or NetSuite with a few hundred invoices a month. The bottleneck is a person retyping PDFs and coding lines, not a configuration gap. That is the problem self-serve solves best.
A controller who needs to move this quarter
You have budget approval now and a close that is slipping. A twelve week implementation does not fix this quarter. Starting on your own invoices this week does.
A bookkeeping or accounting firm testing on one client
You want to see real extraction accuracy on a messy client file before you standardize a workflow across the book. Published pricing makes that easy to model per client.
A team that was quoted an enterprise implementation
You entered an enterprise funnel and got scoped for a project you do not need. Run a self-serve trial first, then decide whether the gap is real or whether it was a sales narrative.
Not a fit: multi-entity, global payments or matrix approvals
Several legal entities with intercompany allocations, cross-border payouts, e-invoicing mandates or approvals routed by department and cost center all need configuration. Go to the demo-gated half of the table and press hard on those specifics.
Who you can actually buy AP automation from today
We checked the public pricing page of every AP automation vendor a US finance team is likely to shortlist, in September 2026, and recorded two things: whether the vendor publishes a number, and whether a buyer can start without a sales conversation. The answers split the category in half.
| Vendor | Publishes list pricing | Start without talking to sales | What its own site asks you to do |
|---|---|---|---|
| AutoPayables | Yes. $49 a month for 200 invoices, $149 for unlimited | Yes. Your first 20 invoices run as a one-time trial | Create an account |
| BILL | Yes. Essentials $49, Team $65, Corporate $89 per user a month, Enterprise custom | Yes, on the three published tiers | "Get Started" |
| Ramp | Yes. Free $0, Plus $15 per user a month plus a platform fee that scales with team size, Enterprise custom | Yes | Sign up |
| Melio | Yes. Go $0, Core $25, Boost $55, Unlimited $80, Platinum custom | Yes | Sign up |
| Tipalti | Partly. A starting price of $99 a month for AP and $249 for Mass Payments, with unlimited users | No. The published price starts a sales conversation | Request a demo |
| Yooz | No dollar figures. The Gold Edition is priced on the volume of documents processed, with an unlimited number of users | Partly. A 15 day trial "made in a production environment" with "no commitments", reached through a form | "Get your free trial" |
| Stampli | No | No | "Request a Quote" |
| Medius | No. Both the AP Essentials and AP 360 packages list "Unlimited Users" but no price | No | "Talk to sales", "Get a quote", "Request Quote" |
| SAP Concur | No | No. There is a self-guided 5 minute demo, but no way to buy | "REQUEST PRICING", "CONTACT SALES", "REQUEST A DEMO" |
| Coupa | No | No | Quote only |
| Esker | No. esker.com/pricing returns a 404 | No | "Request a demo" |
| Basware | No. The pricing page exists and every route on it ends at "speak to our team" | No | Speak to the team |
| Quadient AP | No | No | Book a demo |
| AvidXchange | No | No | Book a demo |
| Ottimate | No. ottimate.com/pricing returns a 404 | No | "Book a Demo" |
| Rillion | No, though the site does state "No per-user pricing" | No | "Book a demo" |
| Factura.ai | No | No | "Request a demo" |
Read that table the way a buyer should. The self-serve half is real and it is not just us: BILL, Ramp and Melio all let you put in a card and start. What the table actually shows is that the split runs along product lines rather than company size. Tools built for a finance team to operate are sold self-serve. Platforms built to be configured by an implementation consultant are sold by a consultant, and the price depends on what that configuration turns out to involve.
Why so many AP vendors will not print a number
It is rarely secrecy for its own sake. Mid-market and enterprise AP platforms price on a combination of invoice volume, entity count, module selection, connector work and services, and those five variables genuinely do produce very different totals for two companies of the same headcount. Basware is the clearest illustration of what that does to a buyer trying to budget. Its own pricing page publishes no figures, and the third-party estimates that fill the vacuum disagree by three orders of magnitude: GetApp has listed it at "$100,000 per feature", ITQlick quotes Invoice Automation "from $50 per user/month", and VendorBenchmark puts it at "$160K-$380K annually for 500K-1M invoice volumes" while elsewhere citing "from $15,000". None of those are Basware figures and none of them should be treated as one.
The practical cost of an unpublished price is not the price. It is the calendar. A quote-only purchase means a discovery call, a scoped demo, a security review, a proposal, a negotiation and a statement of work before a single invoice is captured. Esker's own implementation guidance, as reported by CheckThat.ai, puts a typical deployment at two to three months and a multi-ERP deployment at six to twelve. Medius publishes a go-live window of eight to twelve weeks, and the same pattern shows up across every AP automation implementation we have looked at. If your problem is that invoices are piling up this quarter, that timeline is the product.
When the sales process is worth it
Be honest with yourself about which half of the table you belong in. If you run several legal entities with intercompany allocations, pay suppliers in multiple currencies, need e-invoicing clearance in countries that mandate it, or have to route approvals through a matrix of departments and cost centers, you need configuration, and configuration needs a conversation. Nobody can sell you that off a pricing page, and a vendor who claims otherwise is setting you up for a failed implementation.
The problem is that a large share of the companies sitting through those demos do not have that shape at all. They have one entity, one ledger, a few hundred invoices a month, two or three approvers, and a bookkeeper who is retyping PDFs into QuickBooks. That company gets quoted an implementation because it entered through an enterprise funnel, not because it needs one.
What you get when you start here, and what you do not
AutoPayables is built for the second company. You create an account, forward or upload an invoice, and the extraction runs immediately. Here is the full scope, stated as plainly as we can, because a self-serve product has to be honest about its edges: there is no sales engineer coming to cover the gaps later.
| What AutoPayables does | What it does not do |
|---|---|
| AI capture of vendor, invoice number, PO number, dates, currency, subtotal, tax, discount, shipping, total and every line item, with a confidence score stored per extraction | No payment rail. Money still leaves through your bank or your existing provider, and payments are recorded here against the bill |
| Email intake, so suppliers forward invoices to a dedicated address and they arrive as draft bills | No multi-level, role-based, department or vendor-based approval routing. Approval is one numeric threshold |
| A GL account on every individual invoice line, not one code for the whole document | No reminders, no escalation and no out-of-office delegation on a pending approval |
| Duplicate detection on every bill before it can reach approval: exact file hash, then the same vendor and invoice number after normalization, then the same vendor, amount and date when no number was captured | No vendor bank-change alerting and no fraud scoring |
| Two-way PO matching on vendor and amount within a tolerance percent you set, becoming a three-way match once quantities are received against the PO lines | No commitment matching against a subcontract, no retainage, no lien waivers and no AIA pay applications |
| Export of approved, coded bills in four real import layouts: QuickBooks Online Bills, Xero Bills, NetSuite Vendor Bill and a Sage purchase invoice layout | No entity or subsidiary dimension, and no accounts receivable or customer invoicing |
| A vendor master with tax ID, 1099 flag, payment terms, default GL account and remittance details, plus a full approval audit log | No corporate cards, no virtual cards, no early-payment or rebate program |
If a row on the right is a hard requirement, the demo-gated half of the table is where you should be looking, and you will get a better outcome by starting that conversation now rather than trialing us first.
Can you buy AP automation software without a demo?
Yes. AutoPayables, BILL, Ramp and Melio all let you create an account and begin processing invoices without a sales call, and all four publish their prices, which makes a straight AP automation price comparison possible for that half of the market. The rest of the category, including Stampli, Medius, Coupa, SAP Concur, Esker, Basware, Quadient AP, AvidXchange, Ottimate, Rillion and Factura.ai, routes every buyer through a demo or a quote request first.
Which AP automation vendors publish their pricing?
Four publish complete list pricing: AutoPayables at $49 and $149 a month, BILL at $49 to $89 per user a month, Ramp at $0 and $15 per user a month plus a platform fee, and Melio from $0 to $80 a month. Tipalti publishes a starting price of $99 a month but sells through its team. Yooz prices on document volume without printing a figure. Everyone else is quote only.
Why do AP automation vendors hide their pricing?
Because their price genuinely varies. Enterprise AP platforms bill on some mix of invoice volume, number of legal entities, modules enabled, ERP connector work and professional services, and those inputs can move the annual total by a factor of ten between two similar-sized companies. The tradeoff is that you cannot budget or compare without entering a sales cycle first, which is why third-party estimates for the same vendor differ so wildly.
Is there a free trial for AP automation software?
Trials exist but they usually run through a form rather than a signup button. AutoPayables gives you your first 20 invoices as a one-time trial before any card is charged. Yooz offers a 15 day trial in a production environment with no commitments, reached through its demo form. BILL states a free trial is available in most cases. Most enterprise platforms offer a guided pilot instead, which is scoped and scheduled like an implementation.
How long does it take to start once you have decided?
On a self-serve product, minutes. You create an account, forward an invoice and read the extracted fields back. On a quote-only platform, the honest range published by the vendors themselves is eight to twelve weeks for a single-system go-live and up to twelve months where several ERPs are involved. Neither number is wrong for its audience. The mistake is paying for the second timeline when your problem fits the first.
Do you need an ERP to use AP automation software?
No. AutoPayables holds the vendor master, the GL account list, the purchase orders and the approval log itself, and exports approved bills into QuickBooks, Xero, NetSuite or Sage import layouts. Many of the demo-gated platforms are designed as a layer on top of an ERP and assume a connector project, which is a large part of why their implementations take months.
What to do with the table
Pick your half before you book anything. If you have one entity, one ledger, a few hundred invoices a month and a coding and approval problem rather than a configuration problem, start something self-serve this week and judge it on your own invoices instead of a curated demo dataset. Send a supplier PDF through, look at what came back, and check the coding against what you would have typed. If it holds up on your ugliest invoice, the evaluation is basically finished. If you do belong in the enterprise half, you have just saved yourself three trials and you can open those conversations knowing exactly which capabilities to press on.
Frequently asked questions
Yes. AutoPayables, BILL, Ramp and Melio all let you create an account and start processing invoices without a sales call, and all four publish their prices. Stampli, Medius, Coupa, SAP Concur, Esker, Basware, Quadient AP, AvidXchange, Ottimate, Rillion and Factura.ai all route buyers through a demo or quote request first.
AutoPayables is $49 a month for 200 invoices and $149 a month for unlimited invoices, with your first 20 invoices running as a one-time trial. BILL publishes $49, $65 and $89 per user a month. Ramp publishes $0 and $15 per user a month plus a platform fee. Melio runs from $0 to $80 a month.
On scope, yes, and deliberately. Self-serve tools cover capture, coding, duplicate checks, PO matching and approval well. What they do not cover is multi-entity consolidation, global payment rails, country-by-country e-invoicing compliance and matrix approval routing, which is exactly the configuration work that makes the other half quote-only.
No. AutoPayables holds the vendor master, GL accounts, purchase orders and approval log itself, then exports approved, coded bills in QuickBooks Online, Xero, NetSuite and Sage import layouts. Many quote-only platforms assume an ERP underneath and a connector project on top, which is a large part of their implementation time.
Because it genuinely varies with invoice volume, entity count, modules, connector work and services. The side effect for buyers is that public estimates for the same vendor can differ enormously. Published third-party figures for Basware alone range from $15,000 to $380,000 a year, and none of them come from Basware.
Minutes on a self-serve product: create an account, forward an invoice, check the extracted fields. Quote-only platforms publish their own ranges, with Medius citing eight to twelve weeks to go live and Esker deployments reported at two to three months, or six to twelve months across multiple ERPs.
You do the setup, so the product has to be simple enough that setup is a short job rather than a project. It also means the edges matter: there is no payment rail here, approval is a single numeric threshold rather than a routing matrix, and there is no entity dimension. Those are the rows to check against your own requirements before you start.
Start on your own invoices, not a demo dataset
Your first 20 invoices run as a one-time trial before any card is charged. Upload the worst supplier PDF you have and see what comes back.