You open the Wave app to snap a receipt and it asks you to subscribe. The scanner you remember being free now has a price, and the question in the search bar is simple: what does it cost, and what do I actually get for it?
Here is the straight answer, then the part that matters more: where the receipt ends up.
Does Wave still have a receipt scanner, and what does it cost?
Yes, but it's a paid feature: $8 USD a month on its own, or included in Wave's Pro Plan at $19 a month ($190 a year). Each receipt you scan becomes an expense transaction in your Wave books, not a row in a spreadsheet.
What you get from Wave, and what you get from Slipsheet
Prices and limits as each company lists them today:
| Wave Receipts | Wave Pro Plan | Slipsheet | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cost (USD, plus tax) | $8/month, or $72/year (about $6/month) | $19/month, or $190/year (about $15.83/month) | Starter $5/month; Pro $12/month; yearly billing listed at 17% off; 14-day trial, no card |
| Scans | Unlimited | Unlimited | Starter 250 receipts/month; Pro 1,500/month |
| Inputs | Mobile camera, desktop upload (JPG, GIF, PNG, PDF, up to 10 at a time, 5MB each), email forward (one receipt per email) | Same as Receipts | Photo, PDF, JPG, PNG, HEIC, forwarded email; Pro bulk upload of 100+ at a time |
| What it outputs | An expense transaction in your Wave books | An expense transaction in your Wave books | Reviewed rows exported as a CSV (date, merchant, total, currency, tax, category, client, notes, file name) |
| When you stop paying | New scanning stops; earlier scans stay in your books as transactions | Same as Receipts | Cancel any time; you can export the whole ledger whenever you like, so export before you go |
The scanning itself is similar on both sides. You photograph, upload, or forward, and OCR reads the slip. The difference is where the result lands. Wave puts it in Wave's books as an expense transaction, and Wave's help pages say it merges the scan with a matching expense transaction already in your books. If you cancel, new scanning stops and the old scans stay in your books.
That is exactly right if Wave is your books. You get the expense where your invoices and reports already live, and you don't need another tool.
When you need rows instead
Some people don't want a transaction. They want a row: date, vendor, total, tax, one per receipt, in a file they keep. Maybe a bookkeeper works from a CSV. Maybe the books live in Sheets or Excel. Maybe you want to clean the pile first and bring it into Wave later.
Here is the same idea on one invented week:
| date | vendor | total | tax | source | was sitting in |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2026-08-19 | Lowe’s | $63.45 | $5.22 | thermal slip | paper in the glovebox |
| 2026-08-20 | Blue Bottle Coffee | $14.80 | $1.22 | phone photo | camera roll |
| 2026-08-22 | Staples | $189.50 | $15.61 | email PDF | inbox folder |
| Totals | 3 receipts | $267.75 | $22.05 |
Three receipts from three places: a thermal slip in the glovebox, a phone photo, an emailed PDF. As rows, they sit side by side and add up. Nothing is hidden behind a subscription screen, and the file is yours.
Slipsheet makes those rows. You drop in the photo, the PDF, or the forwarded email, a vision model reads the fields, and you review each row before you export the CSV. If you then want the rows in Wave, the receipt-to-Wave workflow covers the import. There is no live connection between Slipsheet and Wave. You move a file. Nothing here is tax advice.
A few straight answers
Is Wave's receipt scanner free?
No. Wave's receipt scanning needs a Receipts subscription ($8 USD a month or $72 a year) or the Pro Plan ($19 a month or $190 a year), as of October 2026. Wave's free Starter plan doesn't include scanning, though Wave's help pages say you can still attach a receipt file to a transaction by hand.
Was Receipts by Wave discontinued?
The separate Receipts by Wave app is no longer how Wave handles receipts. Today, Wave's own pages put receipt capture inside the main Wave app, on mobile and the web, behind the Receipts or Pro subscription. We couldn't find a Wave page that dates the old app's shutdown, so we won't give one.
Can I attach a scanned receipt to a Wave invoice?
Wave's help pages say invoice and estimate attachments are a Pro Plan feature: you can add files such as JPG, PNG, GIF, or PDF to an invoice, with a 5MB limit for files that travel in the email. Scanning a receipt is a separate job. It creates an expense transaction in your books, not an attachment on an invoice.
Can I get my Wave receipts out as a spreadsheet?
Partly. Wave lets you export reports such as Account Transactions as CSV, and its data export sends accounting files as CSV or XLS plus a ZIP of your uploaded receipt images. That's the books' view, transactions grouped by account. If you want one row per receipt with date, vendor, total, and tax, you build that sheet yourself or use a tool that makes it.