Airbase review

The short answer

Buy Airbase if you are already on Paylocity for payroll and HR, or heading there, and you want invoices, corporate cards and employee expenses governed by one approval policy engine against one vendor database. The consolidation argument is real when the status quo is three systems with three approval chains and a month-end reconciliation across all of them.

Skip it if you do not want a payroll and HR vendor owning your spend controls, because that is now the buying unit. Skip it if high-volume invoice processing against a customised or multi-entity ERP is your acute problem, since the AP module is not as deep as purpose-built AP tools. And skip it if you need a price you can look up.

Where Airbase fits

Airbase pricing

There is no Airbase price to report. Checked on 25 September 2026, airbase.com/pricing redirects to Paylocity's pricing page, and no prices were found anywhere on airbase.com. The spend management features are quoted as part of Paylocity for Finance, which means the pricing question has changed shape rather than merely gone unanswered: you are asking a payroll and HR vendor to price finance modules, and the answer will depend on what else you buy from them. Nothing below is an estimate, because an estimate here would be invention.

Four questions to settle before any number means anything.

1. Whether the finance modules can be bought without Paylocity payroll at all. This is the first question and it reframes everything after it. Ask explicitly whether Paylocity will sell spend management on its own, and ask how the quote changes if you do or do not run Paylocity HCM. A bundled discount that depends on moving payroll is not a software price, it is a platform migration with a software price attached.
2. Which spend modules are in the quote. Bill pay, corporate cards, reimbursements and procurement are separable, and procurement features sit in higher tiers rather than the base. Get each module listed as its own line so you can see what you are buying and drop what you are not. A single platform figure is impossible to compare against a standalone AP tool or a standalone card program.
3. What the pricing basis is: per employee, per module, or a flat platform fee. Per-employee pricing behaves differently from per-module pricing as you grow, and a payroll vendor's instinct is per employee. If the basis is per employee, a company adding headcount faster than it adds spend volume will see the finance line rise for reasons unconnected to finance, so model it against your hiring plan and not your invoice count.
4. Card rebates and payment fees, which can move the total more than the software line does. Spend platforms routinely offset software cost with interchange rebates, so ask for the rebate rate in writing, along with ACH and international payment fees. A quote without those numbers is not comparable to one that includes them, and the rebate is the term where your own card volume gives you bargaining room.

What costs extra

• The module mix is set entirely in the quote, and no add-on prices are published.
• Procurement features including vendor onboarding, contract management and purchase request workflows sit in higher tiers rather than the base module set.
• Card and payment economics run alongside the software line: ask for the interchange rebate rate and for ACH and international payment fees as separate figures.

Implementation and commercial terms

The rows below are what could be confirmed as of 25 September 2026. The redirect to Paylocity's pricing page is itself the most important row, and the page it redirects to could not be read because a Cloudflare challenge blocked it, so treat every commercial term here as something to obtain in writing.

Published price

None. airbase.com/pricing redirects to Paylocity's pricing page.

How it is sold

As Paylocity for Finance, alongside Paylocity HR and payroll.

Implementation fee

None published.

Free trial

None listed. airbase.com offers interactive product tours instead.

Existing customers

Airbase says customers keep their existing contacts. Contract paper at renewal is a question for sales.

Modules

AP automation, corporate cards and employee expenses, with procurement in higher tiers.

Budget this as a Paylocity line item rather than an Airbase subscription, and insist on seeing the finance piece priced on its own even if the commercial offer arrives bundled. Then do the comparison that settles it: put the standalone finance line next to a tool whose prices you can read today. BILL publishes full per-user rates and Tipalti publishes starting platform fees, so you can verify half of that comparison without a sales call. If you are an existing Airbase customer, the specific thing to ask about is renewal: whether your contract moves to Paylocity paper, and whether the price basis changes when it does. That is the question most likely to produce an unwelcome surprise, and it is cheapest to ask a year early.

Source: the Airbase pricing link, which redirects to Paylocity, checked 25 September 2026. Confirm current prices with the vendor before you budget.

What Airbase gives up

How Airbase compares

Two things separate these four tools: whether you can read a price, and whether the product's owner has changed. BILL publishes full per-user rates. Tipalti publishes starting platform fees. Stampli publishes nothing. Airbase publishes nothing and is now sold through Paylocity. Every price below comes from that vendor's own pricing page, checked on 25 September 2026, and anything unpublished is recorded as unpublished rather than estimated.

What to test in an Airbase demo

No free trial is listed; airbase.com offers interactive product tours instead. So the evaluation is a guided demo plus a commercial interrogation, and the commercial half matters more here than on any other tool in this category, because the vendor you are contracting with is not the one whose product you researched.

1. Open with the ownership question and refuse to move on until it is answered. Can the finance modules be bought without Paylocity payroll, and how does the quote change if you do or do not run Paylocity HCM. If the answer is that it only prices well as a bundle, you are evaluating a payroll migration, and that belongs in front of a different group of people in your business.
2. Make them build one approval policy that spans all three spend types. Write a rule once and watch it apply to an invoice, a card request and an expense report in the same session. That single engine across non-payroll spend is the product's actual differentiator, so test it with your real thresholds and a genuine edge case such as a request from someone who is both an approver and a requester.
3. Test pre-approval on card spend, not after-the-fact coding. Issue a virtual card with a limit and a category restriction, try to spend outside both, and watch what the control does and what notification lands where. An AP tool sees the invoice after the commitment, so make the demo prove the pre-approval path blocks something.
4. Connect your real ERP and push every transaction type through it. Create invoices, card transactions and expense reports, then verify the GL entries, department coding and entity structure in the ERP yourself. If you run multi-subsidiary NetSuite or a customised environment, this is the session that decides the deal, and a clean demo on a vanilla instance tells you nothing about your own.
5. Price the pieces separately and get the card economics in writing. Ask for bill pay, cards, reimbursements and procurement as individual lines, establish whether the basis is per employee, per module or a platform fee, and model the per-employee case against your hiring plan rather than your invoice volume. In the same conversation, get the interchange rebate rate plus ACH and international payment fees, and ask what happens to an existing Airbase contract at renewal.

Frequently asked questions about Airbase