If you went looking for QuickBooks Self-Employed recently and couldn't find it, you're not imagining things. Intuit retired it. New signups ended back in 2024, and existing accounts were pointed toward a new product, QuickBooks Solopreneur, at $20 a month or $120 a year.
I'd been watching this category for a while before I built my own way out of it. The pattern is familiar enough. You settle into a tool, you put a few years of records inside it, and then the tool changes underneath you, and the only marked exit leads to a slightly more expensive version of the same subscription.
What happened
Here are the facts, without the editorializing. QuickBooks Self-Employed was discontinued. Intuit stopped new signups in 2024 and moved people toward QuickBooks Solopreneur, which it calls the enhanced replacement. Solopreneur runs $20 a month, or $120 a year if you pay annually.
If you migrate, most of your data comes across: customers, invoices, trips, transactions going back about three years, receipts. A couple of things don't. By Intuit's own migration notes, your rules and your quarterly tax estimates aren't carried over. If the quarterly tax piece was a big part of why you used the tool, that's worth knowing before you click upgrade.
The question isn't which subscription
When you search for a QuickBooks Self-Employed alternative, you get a list. The names are different. The shape is identical. Every result is another cloud account with a monthly fee, your data living on someone else's server, and the same chance that the product gets renamed or repriced a year from now.
That isn't a knock on any one of them. Cloud accounting is a reasonable choice for plenty of people. But it's worth noticing that the whole results page is really one answer to your question, repeated a dozen ways. If renting the category was the part that frustrated you about the shutdown, picking the next subscription down the list doesn't change much.
The honest tradeoff
So I'll be straight about the other path, because it has a real cost.
The tool I use doesn't sync your bank. There's no automatic feed pulling in transactions overnight. You enter your income and expenses yourself, or you import them. For some people that's a dealbreaker, and if it's one for you, go pick a cloud tool with a bank feed. No hard feelings.
Here's what you get in exchange. You own the file. There's no account and no subscription. It works offline, on a plane, in 2035, with no login screen between you and your numbers. There's no company in the loop that can rename it, reprice it, or retire it, because there's no company in the loop at all.
It's just a file on your disk. Nobody can rename it, reprice it, or sunset it out from under you.
That's the trade. A little more by hand, in return for tools you keep.
What I built instead
What I landed on, after trying the spreadsheet route and getting tired of its sharp edges, was TaliiVue. It's a single HTML file you open in any browser, and it's your revenue dashboard: income, expenses, the running profit number, your quarterly tax set-aside, a 1099-NEC tracker for the contractors you pay. Your data lives in the browser, and you can export all of it to a JSON file and reload it on any machine, so you always hold a portable copy you control. No install, no server, no account.
The single-file part isn't a gimmick. The file is the app, which is why it keeps working with nothing else around it. And it handles the quarterly estimated tax math that the Solopreneur migration leaves behind, which is the piece I would have missed most.
Who this is for, and who it isn't
To be fair about it: if you want your bank feed to do the data entry for you, and the monthly fee doesn't bother you, QuickBooks Solopreneur is a perfectly good place to land, and the migration path is built to take you there. That's the easier move, and easier is sometimes the right call.
If what stung about the shutdown was being moved from one rental to the next, and you don't mind entering your own transactions to step out of that pattern, then the own-it-locally path is worth a look. That's the gap TaliiVue was built to fill. If you want to see it before deciding, there's a live demo with a sample year already loaded.
Planning, not advice. How you track your business is your call, and a qualified CPA can tell you what fits your situation.