Kintsugi: tax software platform

Kintsugi publishes half its rate card. Checked on 16 October 2026, the Free plan is $0 with no credit card and Starter is $75 per action in the US and Canada, while Scale and Premium show only the words custom and flat monthly subscription. Buy it if you want to see your exposure before you spend anything.

Rajat GuptaEditorial LeadReviewed 16 October 2026Pricing checked 16 October 2026 against the Kintsugi pricing page

Kintsugi in brief

Kintsugi publishes half its rate card.

Price: $0 (Free plan, no credit card) · Per action on Starter, custom flat monthly subscription above it
Best for: Sellers who want exposure measured first and filings billed as work done
Watch out for: You give up predictability on Starter, which is the price of fairness.

The short answer

Buy Kintsugi if you suspect you have sales tax exposure and want to measure it before committing budget: the Free plan monitors physical and economic nexus across the US and more than 100 countries at $0 with no credit card. Then buy Starter if your filing footprint is the US and Canada and you would rather pay $75 per action than a subscription per state.

Skip it Skip Starter if you register and file outside the US and Canada, because that requires Scale or Premium and neither publishes a price. Skip it too if your billing system needs a live tax rate at invoice time: real-time calculation, API, SDK and single sign-on are Premium only, so that one requirement sets your tier and takes you back into a quote.

Where Kintsugi fits

Kintsugi's structure answers a specific question first: do I have a problem at all. The Free plan costs $0 with no credit card and covers global exposure monitoring for physical and economic nexus across the US and more than 100 countries, historical liability auditing, nexus threshold alerts the moment you cross, AI product categorisation, address validation and an in-app assistant, plus no-code integrations with Shopify, Stripe, Chargebee, BigCommerce and others. Registering, filing and remitting start on Starter. For a finance lead who inherited an unquantified exposure, that ordering is the product's best feature: you can get the diagnosis before the invoice.

Starter is the plan that makes Kintsugi unusual. It charges $75 per action in the US and Canada, and the pricing FAQ defines an action precisely: a registration, a filing, a back filing, a re-file, an amended return or a deregistration that Kintsugi completes for you. Kintsugi also states there are no transaction fees and no per-state subscription, so order volume by itself adds nothing and monitoring every state costs nothing. The bill tracks work done, which is the fairest shape for a seller registered in a handful of states and the most expensive for one registered in twenty filing monthly.

That makes the arithmetic the whole decision, and it is arithmetic you can do yourself. Count your registrations, then your expected filings for a year at your assigned frequencies, then any back filings you owe, and multiply by $75. Compare the result against the flat monthly Scale subscription, which Kintsugi quotes rather than publishes. A seller in three states filing quarterly and a seller in twenty filing monthly are buying different numbers of actions, and the second is the one for whom a flat price is likely to win.

Geography moves you between plans rather than changing a rate. Starter covers registrations and filings in the US and Canada, including GST, HST, PST and QST, while registering and filing in the EU, the UK and the other countries Kintsugi lists requires Scale or Premium, which the page says are priced for the countries you need. Every plan including Free monitors exposure in more than 100 countries, so you will see a foreign obligation arrive before you can act on it, which is useful and also a built-in upgrade prompt.

Premium is where the technical and clean-up work lives, and it is worth knowing that before the first call. Voluntary Disclosure Agreements led by Kintsugi's tax operations team, real-time tax calculation on invoices in QuickBooks, NetSuite and Microsoft Dynamics 365, advanced exemption certificate management with bulk upload, requests, validation and expiry alerts, API, SDK and single sign-on, custom analytics and the Kintsugi Guarantee are all Premium items. Starter and Scale can file back returns for US states, but a formal voluntary disclosure programme is Premium only, so a company with real historical exposure is probably a Premium buyer and should price that from the start.

Kintsugi pricing

Kintsugi publishes two of its four plans. Checked on 16 October 2026, Free is $0 with no credit card required and Starter is $75 per action in the US and Canada, while Scale and Premium show the words custom and flat monthly subscription where a price would be, so no figure is recorded for either. The page is unusually clear about what is not charged: no onboarding fees, no transaction fees, month-to-month contracts with no built-in annual price increase. The open question is what the flat subscription costs, and that is answered only by a quote.

What Kintsugi publishes

Free: $0 (No charge, no credit card required)Global exposure monitoring for physical and economic nexus across the US and more than 100 countries, exposure and historical liability auditing, nexus threshold alerts, AI product categorisation, address validation, the in-app assistant and no-code integrations.
Starter: $75 per action, US and Canada (Per action, month to month)Everything in Free plus registrations, filings, amended returns and deregistrations, back filings for past periods, autoregister and autofile where supported, a virtual mailbox and notice handling, standard onboarding with a nexus study, and 24/7 live chat.
Scale: Quote-based (Custom flat monthly subscription)Everything in Starter plus one flat monthly price covering registrations, filings, amended returns and deregistrations, compliance in the EU, the UK and more than 100 countries priced for the countries you need, Kintsugi handling registration updates, filing frequency changes, rejected payments, payment plans, penalty abatement and refunds, and a dedicated onboarding manager.
Premium: Quote-based (Custom flat monthly subscription)Everything in Scale plus Voluntary Disclosure Agreements led by the tax operations team, real-time tax calculation on invoices in QuickBooks, NetSuite and Microsoft Dynamics 365, advanced exemption certificate management, API, SDK and single sign-on, custom reporting, white-glove onboarding and the Kintsugi Guarantee.

Prices as published on the Kintsugi pricing page and checked on 16 October 2026. Scale is marked as new, and both Scale and Premium show only the words custom and flat monthly subscription, so no figure is recorded for either.

Four things decide what you pay, and the first is the one to count before you take a call.

Your action count, if you are on Starter. An action is a registration, a filing, a back filing, a re-file, an amended return or a deregistration, each at $75, and a filing in each registered state in each period is its own action. Add your registrations to your expected filings and back filings for a full year before assuming per-action is cheaper than a flat subscription, because filing frequency is assigned by the state rather than chosen by you.
Which countries you need, because that sets the plan rather than the rate. Starter covers the US and Canada only, and the EU, the UK and the other countries Kintsugi lists require Scale or Premium, which the page says are priced for the countries you need. Ask for the Scale figure against your exact country list, and ask what happens to it when you add a country mid-term.
Whether you need the tax engine wired in. Real-time calculation on invoices, API and SDK access, single sign-on, advanced exemption certificate management and custom analytics are Premium only. If your billing system has to call for a rate at the moment of invoicing, that single requirement sets your tier, so price Premium from the start rather than planning to add it to Starter later.
Whether you have historical exposure to clean up. Starter, Scale and Premium can all file back returns for US states, but Voluntary Disclosure Agreements led by Kintsugi's tax operations team are a Premium item, and the FAQ notes that back filing and VDA work on Premium is contracted annually rather than month to month. That is the one exception to the month-to-month promise, so get it in writing before you sign.

What costs extra

No separately priced add-on list is published. Features are gated by plan instead, with real-time tax engine integrations, API and SDK access, single sign-on, advanced exemption certificate management and custom analytics reserved for Premium.
The page states there are no transaction fees on any plan, so order volume by itself does not add a charge, and no per-state subscription applies.
Kintsugi states there are no onboarding fees. Starter includes standard onboarding with a nexus study, Scale adds assisted onboarding with a dedicated onboarding manager, and Premium includes white-glove onboarding with a dedicated customer success manager.

Implementation and commercial terms

The rows below are what Kintsugi's own pricing page and its FAQ confirm as of 16 October 2026. This vendor publishes more about contract shape than most in the category, which makes the two unpublished plan prices the only real gap.

Published price: Partly. Free at $0 and Starter at $75 per action; Scale and Premium are quoted.
Billing basis: Per action on Starter, a custom flat monthly subscription on Scale and Premium.
Contract term: Month to month on every paid plan with no built-in annual increase, except back filing and VDA work on Premium, which is contracted annually.
Onboarding fee: None. Onboarding depth rises by plan, from standard with a nexus study to white-glove.
Transaction fees: None on any plan, and no per-state subscription.
Free plan: Permanent rather than a trial: exposure monitoring, historical liability auditing and nexus alerts at $0.

Budget Kintsugi in two steps, and start the first today. Sign up for the Free plan at $0, let it audit your historical liability and tell you which thresholds you have crossed, then use that output as the input to pricing: registrations plus a year of filings plus any back filings, multiplied by $75, is your Starter number. Take that figure into the Scale conversation so the flat monthly quote has something to beat, and ask for it against your exact country list. If you need real-time calculation, the API or a voluntary disclosure programme, price Premium from the start and get the annual contracting exception on back filing and VDA work in writing. Then compare with TaxJar and Avalara, both of which publish, because a per-action bill and a per-state bill behave differently as you grow.

Source: the Kintsugi pricing page, checked 16 October 2026. Confirm current prices with the vendor before you budget.

What Kintsugi gives up

You give up predictability on Starter, which is the price of fairness. A per-action bill moves with work rather than with a subscription, so a quarter with three new registrations, a batch of back filings and a couple of amended returns costs more than a quiet one. That is honest, and it is harder to put in a budget than a flat line. If finance wants one number a month, you are being pushed toward Scale, whose price is not published, and that is a deliberate design rather than an accident.

You give up international filing on the published plan. Starter covers registrations and filings in the US and Canada, and everywhere else requires Scale or Premium. Meanwhile every plan, Free included, monitors exposure in more than 100 countries, so you will be told about a UK or EU obligation on a plan that cannot act on it. The information is genuinely useful and the structure also means your first foreign threshold crossing is a pricing conversation, not a configuration change.

You give up the tax engine unless you buy the top plan. Real-time calculation on invoices in QuickBooks, NetSuite and Microsoft Dynamics 365, API and SDK access, single sign-on and advanced exemption certificate management are Premium only. For a company that needs rates calculated at checkout or at invoice time, that is not a nice-to-have, and it means the realistic entry point is a quoted plan rather than the published one. Establish that requirement before you start a Starter subscription you will outgrow in a quarter.

You give up monitoring your own state portals, by Kintsugi's own statement. The pricing FAQ says that on every plan you keep an eye on your own state and provincial portals: Kintsugi Mail receives your tax mail and handles a notice once you forward it, but it does not watch the portals for you. That is a reasonable division of labour and it is still work that stays on your desk, so somebody on your team needs it in their job description rather than assuming the vendor has it.

You give up the guarantee on the cheaper plans. The Kintsugi Guarantee, under which Kintsugi says it pays penalties or interest caused by its own calculation or filing error, is included with Premium only, and its full terms sit in the agreement rather than on the page. If penalty cover is part of why you are outsourcing compliance, it is a Premium line item rather than a property of the product, so ask for the written terms and their limits before you treat it as insurance.

How Kintsugi compares

Sales tax compliance divides on the metering unit, and that matters more than the headline figure: Kintsugi charges per action, TaxJar prices by monthly order volume with filing credits on top, Avalara charges per state, Zamp scopes a single managed price, and no Anrok figure could be read at all. Every price below comes from that vendor's own pricing page on its own check date, and anything unpublished is recorded as unpublished rather than estimated.

Tool	Best for	Price	Where it breaks
Kintsugi	Teams wanting free exposure monitoring first and paid work billed per action	Free at $0, Starter $75 per action	The EU, UK and wider coverage, plus real-time calculation and the API, sit in quoted plans
TaxJar	Ecommerce sellers whose cost should track monthly order volume	$39 and $99 a month at 200 orders	Filing is billed in AutoFile credits at $50 and $55, and API access starts on the higher plan
Avalara	Multi-state sellers who want a per-state rate they can read and multiply	$79 per state/month, or $69 on the SST plan	Businesses above $50M in revenue move to a custom quote with no published rate
Zamp	Teams who want one managed price scoped to their own footprint	Not published, quote only	Both paid plans say contact sales, so the price depends entirely on a scoping call
Anrok	Software and digital product sellers wanting a SaaS-specific vendor	Could not be accessed on 16 October 2026	Every request to anrok.com returned HTTP 403, so no figure could be read

What to test in a Kintsugi trial

There is no time-limited trial, and you do not need one: the Free plan is permanent, costs $0 and needs no credit card, so you can run the diagnosis half of the evaluation before talking to anyone. Spend that time on the two things that decide the plan: your real exposure, and your real action count.

Connect your actual sales data on the Free plan and let it audit historical liability. The plan covers exposure monitoring for physical and economic nexus across the US and more than 100 countries, historical liability auditing and threshold alerts, so you should finish this step with a jurisdiction-by-jurisdiction picture rather than an impression. That output is the input to every other decision, including whether you need a voluntary disclosure route.
Check the product categorisation on your own catalogue, not a sample. AI product categorisation and address validation are included from Free, and taxability of your specific items is what generates notices later. Look hard at bundles, services, shipping and anything you sell into a state where your category is contested, and flag what you disagree with while it costs nothing to ask.
Count your actions for a full year and price Starter yourself. Registrations plus expected filings at the frequencies states assign you, plus back filings you already owe, each at $75. Then ask for the Scale quote with your exact country list, and compare. Kintsugi says there are no transaction fees and no per-state subscription, so order growth alone should not change either number: confirm that in writing.
Test the notice path before you need it. Kintsugi states that you watch your own state and provincial portals, that Kintsugi Mail receives your tax mail, and that once you forward a notice the team takes it from there. Send a real notice through that path during the evaluation and time the response, because this is the task that consumes a finance team's week.
Settle the terms that sit outside the published rate. Confirm that every paid plan is month to month with no built-in annual increase, and get the one exception, back filing and VDA work on Premium contracted annually, in writing. If you need real-time calculation, the API, single sign-on or the Kintsugi Guarantee, ask for Premium priced now rather than later, and ask for the guarantee's full terms and limits from the agreement rather than the website.

Frequently asked questions about Kintsugi

How much does Kintsugi cost?

As of 16 October 2026 Kintsugi publishes a Free plan at $0 with no credit card, and Starter at $75 per action in the US and Canada, where an action is a registration, filing, back filing, re-file, amended return or deregistration. Scale and Premium are a custom flat monthly subscription, quoted.

What counts as an action on the Starter plan?

Kintsugi's pricing FAQ defines an action as a registration, a filing, a back filing, a re-file, an amended return or a deregistration that Kintsugi completes for you, each at $75. Exposure monitoring, alerts and CSV imports are free, so the bill tracks work done rather than sales volume.

Does Kintsugi charge per transaction or per state?

Neither. Kintsugi states there are no transaction fees and no per-state subscription. Exposure monitoring across every state is free, Starter charges $75 for each action completed, and Scale and Premium replace per-action pricing with one flat monthly price covering registrations, filings, amended returns and deregistrations.

Is the Kintsugi Free plan free forever?

Yes, and it is permanent rather than a trial. The Free plan is $0 with no credit card and covers global exposure monitoring for physical and economic nexus across the US and more than 100 countries, historical liability auditing, nexus threshold alerts, product categorisation, address validation and no-code integrations. Registering and filing start on Starter.

Which plan do I need to file outside the US and Canada?

Scale or Premium. Starter covers registrations and filings in the US and Canada only, while the EU, the UK and the other countries Kintsugi lists require one of the quoted plans, priced for the countries you need. Every plan including Free monitors exposure in more than 100 countries.

Are there onboarding fees?

No. The pricing page states there are no onboarding fees and no transaction fees as of 16 October 2026. Starter includes standard onboarding with a nexus study, Scale adds assisted onboarding with a dedicated onboarding manager, and Premium includes white-glove onboarding with a dedicated customer success manager.

Is Kintsugi a long-term contract?

Mostly no. Kintsugi says every paid plan is month to month with no built-in annual price increase, with Starter billed per action under a short digital agreement. The one exception is back filing and Voluntary Disclosure Agreement work on Premium, which is contracted annually, so get that term in writing.

Does Kintsugi handle back taxes and voluntary disclosure?

Back returns for US states can be filed on Starter, Scale and Premium. Voluntary Disclosure Agreements led by Kintsugi's tax operations team are a Premium item, and that work is contracted annually. If you have real historical exposure, price Premium from the start rather than expecting to add it later.

Does Kintsugi integrate with QuickBooks or NetSuite?

For real-time tax calculation, only on Premium. Kintsugi lists real-time calculation on invoices in QuickBooks, NetSuite and Microsoft Dynamics 365, plus API, SDK and single sign-on, as Premium features. No-code integrations with Shopify, Stripe, Chargebee, BigCommerce and others, and CSV upload, are available from the Free plan.

Who covers penalties if a Kintsugi filing is wrong?

Kintsugi does, on Premium only. The Kintsugi Guarantee is its promise that if a calculation it made or a filing error of its own leads to penalties or interest, it pays them, with full terms in your agreement. On Free, Starter and Scale that cover is not included, so ask for the written limits.