Shoeboxed Pricing: Plans and Cost Per Scan

Every Shoeboxed figure below was read from shoeboxed.com/pricing. Arithmetic is labeled as arithmetic.

Shoeboxed costs $9, $29, $79 or $179 a month, or $97, $297, $797 and $1,997 a year for the same four plans. What the plan buys is not storage or seats, it is a scan allowance: 30 digital scans a month on Starter, 200 on Pro, 750 on Plus and 500 on Paper Plus. Paper handled through the mail-in Magic Envelope is metered separately from digital uploads, and running past either allowance costs $0.10 to $0.30 per digital scan and $1.50 to $2.00 per paper scan.

That two-meter structure is the part most pricing summaries miss, and it is the part that decides whether Shoeboxed is cheap or expensive for you. Below is the full rate card, the real annual discount, the cost per scan on each tier, and the point where a mail-in service stops being the right purchase.

How much does Shoeboxed cost?

Shoeboxed costs $9 a month on Starter, $29 on Pro, $79 on Plus and $179 on Paper Plus. Paying annually brings those to $97, $297, $797 and $1,997 for the year, which Shoeboxed displays as $8.08, $24.75, $66.42 and $166.42 a month. Every plan includes unlimited mileage tracking, the iOS and Android app, audit proof reports and CSV export, and a 30 day risk free trial.

Two details in that table are easy to read past. Starter gives you 20 paper scans per year, not per month, so it is effectively a digital-only plan with a token amount of mail-in included. And Paper Plus, despite costing more than Plus, gives you fewer digital scans, 500 against 750. You are paying the extra $1,200 a year for paper capacity, not for more of everything.

Is Shoeboxed cheaper if you pay annually?

Yes, but by less than the page suggests. Shoeboxed advertises savings of 11 percent on Starter, 17 percent on Pro and 19 percent on Plus. Running the published monthly and annual prices against each other gives 10.2, 14.7 and 15.9 percent. The gap is small in dollars but worth knowing before you build a budget on the advertised figure.

The percentages in the fourth column are our arithmetic on Shoeboxed published prices. The fifth column is what Shoeboxed prints on its own plan cards.

What is a Magic Envelope and what does it cost?

The Magic Envelope is Shoeboxed prepaid mail-in service. You fill a supplied envelope with paper receipts, mail it, and staff at the Durham, North Carolina facility scan and process the contents for you. Each plan includes a set number: one a year on Starter, one a quarter on Pro, one a month on Plus and two a month on Paper Plus. Extra envelopes cost $9 each on every tier.

This is the genuinely distinctive part of the product and it is worth being straight about: no software-only tool does it. If your problem is a physical box of curled thermal receipts nobody wants to photograph one at a time, mailing them to somebody who will is a real service and $9 an envelope is not a bad price for it. Shoeboxed also lets you choose whether documents are shredded at the facility or returned, with shredding the default on new plans.

How much is Shoeboxed per receipt?

Between roughly $0.09 and $0.33 per digital scan on plan allowance, depending on tier. Dividing each annual price by the digital scans it includes for the year gives $0.269 on Starter, $0.124 on Pro, $0.089 on Plus and $0.333 on Paper Plus. Going past the allowance costs more than the allowance itself on the lower tiers.

The cost per scan column is our arithmetic. The overage columns are Shoeboxed published rates. Notice that overage is priced just above the allowance rate on every tier, which is a deliberate and fairly reasonable design: it nudges you to upgrade rather than punishing a busy month. The exception is paper. At $2.00 a scan on Starter and Pro, sending 100 unplanned paper receipts costs $200, more than two thirds of a full year of Pro.

Which Shoeboxed plan do I need?

Size the paper meter first, then the digital one. Paper is where the money is, and the two allowances do not substitute for each other.

• Starter at $97 a year suits a sole trader who photographs receipts on a phone and has almost no paper to mail. Thirty scans a month is roughly one a day. Storage is capped at three years and it is a single user.
• Pro at $297 a year is the first plan that behaves like a business tool: 200 digital scans a month, 20 paper scans a month, Gmail receipt sync, three users, QuickBooks Online and Xero integrations, and scans stored for as long as the account is active rather than three years.
• Plus at $797 a year adds real volume at 750 digital scans a month, ten users and a monthly envelope. This is the tier for a small team or a bookkeeper handling several clients.
• Paper Plus at $1,997 a year exists for one situation: more than 100 paper receipts a month. It buys 200 paper scans and two envelopes a month while cutting digital scans back to 500.

The three year storage cap on Starter deserves a second look if you are keeping records for tax reasons. The IRS generally wants supporting documents kept for three years from the filing date, and longer in several situations, so a plan that stops storing scans at three years is cutting it fine. Our notes on IRS receipt requirements cover which situations extend that window. If those receipts are feeding a return, the point of digitizing them is that the numbers end up somewhere useful, whether that is a ledger or an AI that reads your W-2s and 1099s and assembles the filing itself.

Does Shoeboxed integrate with QuickBooks?

Yes, from the Pro plan upward. Shoeboxed lists accounting integrations with QuickBooks Online and Xero on Pro, Plus and Paper Plus. Starter does not include them, so a solo user on the $97 plan gets CSV export and audit proof reports but no direct sync into a ledger. If a QuickBooks connection is the reason you are buying, Pro at $297 a year is the real entry price, not $97.

Is Shoeboxed worth it?

It depends almost entirely on whether your receipts are paper or pixels. Shoeboxed is priced as a service business, because that is what it is. Someone opens your envelope, scans the contents and verifies the data. If you genuinely have a drawer of paper and no intention of dealing with it, that service is worth paying for and nothing else in this category replicates it.

If your receipts already arrive as PDFs, email attachments and phone photos, the arithmetic changes sharply. You are paying mail-in service prices for something you could upload yourself. At 750 digital scans a month, Plus costs $797 a year. A per page extraction tool like ours starts at $49 a month, or $288 a year on annual billing, and covers 2,500 pages a month, which is over 30,000 a year. That is roughly one cent a page against nine cents, and the gap widens as volume grows.

Two of those rows go to Shoeboxed, and they are not small. Mail-in scanning and mileage tracking are real features we do not offer. The honest read is that these are different purchases: Shoeboxed sells a paper problem solved by people, and per page extraction sells volume economics on documents that are already digital. Plenty of businesses have both problems and end up using something for the shoebox and something else for the monthly flow.

What are the alternatives to Shoeboxed?

For the mail-in service specifically, the field is thin, which is exactly why Shoeboxed can charge what it does. For everything else there is real choice, and the models differ more than the prices. AutoEntry bills in weighted credits where a receipt costs one and a bank statement page costs three, which we break down in full on our AutoEntry pricing page. Dext bills per client with a minimum, and Hubdoc charges a flat $12 a month. Tools priced per page, including ours, charge the same for every document regardless of type.

If the decision is really about clearing a backlog rather than a monthly subscription, the practical question is how many documents you can push through at once. A bulk receipt scanner handles a folder in one upload instead of metering it a scan at a time, and our Shoeboxed alternative comparison covers what you keep and what you give up making that switch. For teams whose pile is mostly supplier invoices rather than till receipts, invoice capture software is the closer fit.

Does Shoeboxed have a free trial?

Shoeboxed offers a 30 day risk free trial on every plan. It does not publish a permanently free tier, so continued use after the trial requires a paid plan starting at $9 a month or $97 a year. Cancellation is handled by phone through the billing team rather than in the app, and Shoeboxed advises exporting your account data before canceling.