Free invoicing in Spain: limits and how to choose (2026)

A free plan is useful when it lets you finish your regular work without rebuilding it elsewhere. When choosing invoicing software in Spain, invoice volume is only the first filter: expenses, scans, access for other people and the ability to recover your data also matter.

Editorial disclosure: Frihet publishes this Journal and is one of the products compared. We have a commercial interest in your choosing it. This is a documentation review, not an independent trial: we have not timed tasks or tested these providers’ support for this article.

What we compare and why

We reviewed the official pages on 17 September 2026. We selected three commercial products with documented free plans — Alegra, Contasimple and Frihet — and included the AEAT’s public application. The selection helps compare access models; it does not claim to cover the whole market or establish that these are the only options.

The scope is Spain, including in translated editions. We do not transfer terms from a Latin American site to its Spanish version or assume that the reader’s language determines their business’s country.

Limits we can check

These are published terms on the review date, not guarantees that a provider will retain them indefinitely. We do not mark a feature as absent merely because a marketing page does not mention it.

Alegra clearly describes the move from trial to free plan. Contasimple also provides an initial trial of higher-tier features: when evaluating a workflow, check whether it remains available in Básico. Starting without paying does not mean continuing with the same setup without a subscription.

Three situations that change the decision

Few clients, several document types. Suppose you create 3 invoices, 1 quote and 1 expense record each month. That is 5 documents a month and 60 a year. Contasimple Básico’s allowance would not cover this example, even though you only issue 36 invoices a year. For someone creating just a few documents over the entire year, it is still worth considering.

Steady invoicing with little spare capacity. If you issue 8 monthly invoices, you have 2 left before Alegra Gratis’s published limit. Before choosing it, ask how corrections, drafts and additional documents are counted: we have not verified those details and should not guess. Repeat the calculation for your busiest month.

Many invoices and plenty of receipts. A hypothetical workflow of 80 invoices and 12 scans a month fits within Frihet Free’s invoice allowance but exceeds its scan allowance by 7. You would need to evaluate another plan or capture some documents another way. Quoting “999 invoices” without mentioning the 5 scans hides an important distinction for this business.

These are illustrative calculations, not customer measurements or product tests. The best fit changes when the task that limits your work changes.

The AEAT: check the workflow

The AEAT documentation describes customer and product management, including import and export options. It would therefore be incorrect to say it cannot manage customers. Its issuing guide explains that it runs in a live environment: issued invoices have tax consequences. Do not use that application to issue fictional examples. Check the manual for supported operations and do not equate issuing invoices with a complete accounting or tax-filing system.

A selection exercise you can repeat

Before importing everything, prepare a small set of fictional data. Use a demonstration environment, where available, to work through these tasks and record the result. For the AEAT’s live application, consult its documentation and videos without issuing test invoices.

1. Prepare an invoice with two line items and the format your client needs. Check the output and editable fields.
2. Work through correcting an error and locate the connection between the original and corrected documents. A good-looking PDF is not enough.
3. Record an expense, check its supporting document and note which steps consume an allowance or require a paid feature.
4. Export a small sample. Open the files and check amounts, dates, numbering series, contacts and links to supporting documents. Downloading PDFs does not demonstrate that you can migrate the full dataset.
5. Confirm what you can view or export after downgrading or cancelling. Save the provider’s answer and the date you checked.

Keep a four-column worksheet: task, expected result, observed result and plan condition. “Awaiting confirmation” is more useful than a box ticked on intuition. If you work with an accountant, ask them to check the export sample before moving your historical records.

When paying may make sense

Compare subscription cost with the work left outside the software. As a purely hypothetical example, 10 minutes of duplicated work each week adds up to roughly 8.7 hours a year. At a value of EUR 20 an hour, that is about EUR 173 annually. This calculation does not prove that any program saves that time: it identifies what is worth measuring in your own workflow.

When asking for a price, separate monthly or annual billing, taxes, introductory offers, renewal, users, document capture and export. Ask for the cost of the complete workflow you have described.

To clarify what you need, compare ERP and online accounting and review invoicing mistakes that create extra work and costs. Use them to define the tasks you will test.

If you are considering Frihet, start with its current limits and the same workflow and exit exercise. If another product fits your tasks, volume and accountant better, that is a sufficient reason to choose it.