Keeper Tax Pricing 2026: Keeper Tax Cost for Standard, Premium and the Keeper App

Why the Keeper pricing page shows two plans and the help center shows four

Go to keepertax.com/pricing and you will find a page titled Compare plans. It is a long feature matrix with two price columns, Standard at $199 and Premium at $399, running through roughly forty line items from W-2 income and the standard deduction down to AMT, foreign income exclusion and corporate filing. It is a good page for working out which of the two annual plans you need. It is not a complete price list, because the $20 a month Only Deductions subscription is not on it, and neither is the $1,199 Business plan.

Those two live in the help center. The Subscriptions article lists Only Deductions at $20 billed monthly, Filing + Deductions at $199 billed yearly and Premium at $399 billed yearly, and a separate article covers the Business plan and the add-on table above. The $199 plan is called Standard on the pricing page and Filing + Deductions in the help center. They are the same plan. We checked the pricing page source to make sure the monthly plan was not simply hidden by a rendering choice; the only dollar figures in the document are $199 and $399.

Keeper rebranded from Keeper Tax to Keeper and its positioning has moved with it. The homepage now leads with tax filing for what it calls modern workers, S-Corps, rental property and investments, and the app is titled Keeper: Tax Filing and Expenses in both stores. The site navigation lists income tracking and mileage tracking as upcoming features rather than available ones, which is worth knowing if either is the reason you are looking at it.

What the $20 a month plan does and does not include

Only Deductions is the tracking half of Keeper sold on its own. You link bank and card accounts, up to ten institutions, and the app scans transactions for expenses a 1099 worker can deduct: the business share of a phone bill, software, equipment, home office costs, supplies. It suggests categories, lets you set rules, stores receipt photos and notes, and gives you a running estimate of your tax position. When you are ready to file, you request an export of the deductions it found and take that to a preparer or another filing product.

What it does not do is file. That sounds obvious, but it is the detail behind most of the pricing confusion around Keeper, because the app is widely described as a $20 a month tax app and $20 a month does not get you a return. It also means the plan is priced against the wrong competitor in most roundups. The real comparison for Only Deductions is QuickBooks Solopreneur, also $20 a month with no filing included, or Hurdlr Premium at $9.99, or Everlance Starter at $10.99, all of which track expenses and none of which file on that tier. Our Keeper alternatives page works through those.

The arithmetic that matters is the break-even against Standard. Ten months of Only Deductions is $200, one dollar more than a year of Standard, which includes everything the monthly plan does plus the return itself. So the monthly plan is the right buy only if you want Keeper for tracking for nine months or fewer and you are certain you will file elsewhere.

Standard at $199: what a tax pro signature actually means here

Standard includes the tracking above plus e-filing of a federal return and up to two state returns, and the line on the pricing page that separates it from most software at this price: the return is reviewed and signed by a tax pro. That is a preparer signature on the return, not a chat window. Keeper's terms describe the arrangement as third-party tax return preparers working through the service, and the refund guarantee in those terms covers the case where a preparer fails to provide the service or misses a material error.

Standard covers the ordinary self-employed picture: W-2 and Schedule C income, itemized business deductions, the standard or itemized personal deduction, child and education credits, homeowner and saver's credits, interest, dividends, stock and crypto, capital loss carryover, unemployment income, childcare credits, and the quarterly tax payment calculation. It supports up to ten linked financial institutions and receipt photos.

What pushes people to Premium is a fixed list, and it is worth reading before you assume you need the higher plan: a third state, rental property or K-1 income on Schedule E, EV credits, AMT, the foreign income exclusion, audit protection, filing a prior-year return, or amending one. If none of those applies, Premium is $200 you do not need to spend.

Premium at $399: who the extra $200 is for

Premium is priced for two kinds of people. The first has a genuinely more complicated return: rental property, a K-1 from a partnership, income from three or more states, foreign income, or an EV credit. The pricing page marks each of those as not included on Standard, so this group has no choice on plan.

The second kind has a simple return and a messy history. Premium includes filing prior-year returns for 2022 through 2025 and amending returns already filed, whether or not they were filed with Keeper. If you have a year you never filed, or a filed return with a missed deduction worth more than $200, Premium can pay for itself in the first month. Prior-year returns outside that window are $200 each.

Premium also adds audit protection, described in the help center as audit resolution support with help abating penalties, a 1:1 call with your tax pro every quarter, and quarterly payment scheduling: on Premium, Keeper can schedule your federal estimated payments for the year when you file, so you are not relying on remembering four dates. One thing the help center is candid about: Keeper does not guarantee a refund amount and is not responsible for covering discrepancies if you are audited over an unintentional reporting error. Audit protection is help through the process, not insurance against the outcome.

The 14-day trial, the auto-charge, and the one-month refund window

Every Keeper account starts with a 14-day trial, and you choose a plan at signup. When the trial ends you are charged for that plan automatically unless you cancelled first. Keeper's terms set the deadline precisely: cancel by 11:59 pm Pacific on the day before the trial expires. The help center adds that if you miss it and get charged, you can contact support, and that during the trial you can complete a return and submit it for review, but you cannot export your deductions or actually file with the IRS until you are on a paid plan.

The refund rule after that is stricter than most people assume from a 14-day trial. Section 5.3 of the terms says Keeper may grant a refund if you cancel no later than one month after the start of your first subscription term, and that otherwise there is no refund for unused time, prepayments or anything else. Cancelling is done in Settings, under Manage subscription, at least one day before the next term starts, or by emailing support. Access continues to the end of the paid term.

Two separate guarantees do refund the subscription fee regardless of timing: a maximum refund guarantee, if another service produces a larger refund from the same information on an amended return, and a service guarantee if a technical error or a preparer failure led to an incorrect return. Both have conditions attached and neither covers additional tax, interest or penalties. Read them before you rely on them.

The prices still circulating that Keeper does not charge

Search for Keeper's cost and the first page carries figures the vendor no longer publishes. A $16 a month plan with a bookkeeper assigned to your account appears on at least one review that ranks for the pricing term; Keeper's own sources show no $16 plan and no bookkeeper on any individual plan. A Just Filing tier at $99 a year appears on two more; the vendor pages and help center list no filing plan below $199. A 7-day trial appears alongside the real 14-day one. And older complaints about $168 and $192 annual charges are quoted as if they were current prices, when they are simply what the plans cost in earlier years.

None of this is a criticism of the reviewers, who were often right when they wrote. It is a reason to read the source. Keeper's help center is behind a bot check that stops most automated tools, so directories and comparison engines cannot refresh from it and fall back to whatever was typed into a profile years ago, which is exactly the mechanism that keeps Hurdlr's $60 a year figure alive. For a product whose main differentiator is accuracy, that is an ironic place to be, and it is why every figure on this page carries the date it was read.

Who Keeper is priced right for, and who it is not

Keeper is priced well for a US 1099 worker with a single-state Schedule C who wants deductions found all year and a return filed and signed at the end of it for one flat $199. Against TurboTax Premium at $139 plus $64 a state with no tracking and no signature, or a preparer at $300 to $600, that is a fair price. Two-state filers do even better, because the second state is included where TurboTax charges another $64.

It is priced less well for three groups. Anyone whose largest deduction is the car should look at Everlance Professional, which files the return for $119.99 with audit defense included and is built around mileage, which Keeper does not track. Anyone who needs real books, a chart of accounts a CPA can open, should look at Hurdlr Pro at $200 or QuickBooks Online, because Keeper's only route to a P&L is a $200 service. And anyone whose problem is income rather than expenses is in the wrong category entirely.

That last group is who this site is for. Keeper reads a bank feed, and a bank feed sees a Twitch, Etsy, Gumroad or Amazon payout as one net deposit. It does not see the fee the platform took first, which is the number that has to be added back because platforms report gross on a 1099-K. Earnly shows each payout as gross, then fees, then take-home across twelve platforms, with a payout calendar of expected pay dates, from $12 a month billed yearly. It does not find deductions and it does not file. A lot of creators run Keeper for April and Earnly for the other eleven months, and the self-employed income tracker page shows what that side of the ledger looks like.