Insights, guides, and updates
Per-client and per-user app fees levy a decision tax accountants have paid since QuickBooks Desktop gave way to subscriptions. Part 2 of Buy vs. build reads the pricing wrapper the way an accountant should, as a risk contract: who carries the token volatility, who holds the repricing option, and what to watch as usage-based pricing arrives.
Karbon asked clients what should happen to your fee when AI makes the work faster, and 37% said it should come down, which is close to what the IRS told tax practitioners in June. Deliver something they have never had instead and 54% will pay more. Three of the four walls of the pricing vise moved in a single week.
Xero has had a request open since 2017 to let you export bank rules, with 540 votes and still nothing shipped. QuickBooks Online has done it for years. As your firm starts encoding real judgment into AI agents and skills inside vendor platforms, that gap stops being a nuisance and becomes the question that decides whether your build compounds for your firm or evaporates.
June's conferences said buy and build in the same breath, and agreed most accounting apps are LLM wrappers. But the intelligence was never the whole product: every app subscription bundles five layers, and the wrapper critique prices only one. Part 1 of Buy vs. build unbundles what an app actually sells you.
Anthropic shipped two things this week that answer the same question in opposite ways: a feature that turns one screen recording into an editable procedure file, and a model that checks its own work brilliantly and remembers none of it. Meanwhile OpenAI launched a program teaching small-business owners to do their own accounting, and a top-15 firm committed its whole client accounting practice to a firm-trained AI model. The question running under all of it is which of these leaves anything behind.
A returning client chose our cheaper self-service tier, left the integrations broken, and handed us a year-end file so damaged we spent more hours than the full-service fee would have covered — then balked at the bill, took the discount, and left anyway. Every firm runs some version of that inversion: the cleanup, the harder job, is the one we discount. As "my AI does the books" spreads, here's the pricing mechanism that stops it.
