Compare · Paidnice
Paidnice automates the sending. Nobody has automated the deciding.
Paidnice is a well-built automation layer on top of Xero and QuickBooks, and it does one thing we do not do at all: it applies late fees and interest consistently, on every invoice, without anybody having to be brave about it.
If your problem is that late fees never get applied because applying them is awkward, Paidnice fixes that directly and cheaply, and at low invoice volumes it costs a fraction of what we do.
The short answer
Paidnice starts at about £49 and is priced by how many invoices you send. It automates the mechanical half of credit control very well, and leaves the judgement, the phone calls and the escalation exactly where they were.
Side by side
Automation and delegation are not the same purchase.
| Dimension | Paidnice | Hound |
|---|---|---|
| What it costs | Essentials about £49 a month for 150 invoices. Pro scales by volume: about £74 at 300 invoices, £199 at 1,000, £599 at 4,000. | £199 a month regardless of how many invoices are on the book, plus 8% of a qualifying recovery capped at £1,000 an invoice. |
| How it is priced | By invoice volume, so the cost grows with the size of your ledger. | Flat. A busy month and a quiet month cost the same. |
| The thing it is best at | Applying late fees, interest and statements automatically and consistently, which is a discipline most businesses lack. | Being the one who keeps asking after the automation has run out of things to send. |
| Who handles a reply | You. It is an automation layer, so a human reply comes back to a human, which is you. | Us. A reply stops the sequence until a person has read it, and disputes leave it entirely. |
| Trial | Free for your first 20 actions, which is a usage trial rather than a time-limited one. | 60-day on a single stuck invoice, with nothing charged at all if we recover nothing. |
| Statutory interest | Late fees are a core feature. We could not confirm that the figure is calculated specifically under the UK 1998 Act rather than as a general late fee. | Calculated under the 1998 Act per invoice, with the correct compensation band, and it is yours to keep. |
| Escalation | Dispute workflows and automatically generated letters. We found no published route to a solicitor or a court claim. | A documented pack to a regulated firm, at cost, on your instruction. |
| Integrations | Xero and QuickBooks primarily, plus Stripe and a range of business tools. | Xero, QuickBooks, Sage and FreeAgent, read-only. |
No ticks and crosses, because these are two different jobs rather than the same job done well and badly. Figures checked 6 August 2026.
01
Automating late fees is genuinely worth doing.
Most trades never charge interest on a late invoice, and the reason is not that they do not know they can. It is that adding it to a specific invoice, for a specific customer, on a specific Tuesday, feels like an escalation you have to justify.
Automation solves that neatly, because a fee that applies to everybody automatically is a policy rather than a personal decision. Paidnice does that well and it is the single strongest argument for buying it.
We do the same thing for statutory interest, calculated under the Late Payment of Commercial Debts (Interest) Act 1998 with the correct fixed compensation band per invoice, and it is added from the start rather than as a punishment later. Work out what that is on your own worst invoice.
02
The automation stops where the difficulty starts.
An automated ladder can send four increasingly firm emails, apply a fee, and generate a statement. What it cannot do is notice that this particular customer always pays after the second phone call, that the site manager has left, or that the reason nothing is moving is a variation nobody put in writing.
Nor can it decide to stop. The most damaging thing an automation can do is send the fifth firm letter to somebody who replied to the fourth explaining that half the invoice is disputed. Our sequences stop dead on any reply until a person has read it, and a genuine dispute leaves the sequence altogether.
That is the boundary between automating credit control and delegating it, and it is the only meaningful difference between these two products.
03
Where the pricing crosses over.
At low volumes Paidnice is much cheaper than us and it is not close: about £49 a month against ours. At around 1,000 invoices a month their Pro tier reaches roughly £199, which is the same as our flat price, and above that it keeps climbing while ours does not.
That crossover is worth knowing before you buy either. If you send a handful of invoices a month and want fees applied consistently, they are the better value. If you are sending a thousand, we cost the same and somebody else does the work. Our 8% sits on top, but only on recoveries more than 45 days overdue and never more than £1,000 on one invoice.
Where we are the wrong answer
When Paidnice is the better buy.
The case for them is straightforward and at the small end it is strong. If this is you, buy the automation.
- Your invoice volume is low. At 150 invoices a month they cost roughly a quarter of what we do.
- Your actual problem is that late fees and statements never get applied consistently. That is precisely the thing they automate.
- You are on Xero or QuickBooks and want something that bolts on this afternoon without anybody new being involved in your customer relationships.
- Somebody in your business will reliably pick up the replies, make the calls, and decide when to escalate. Automation is leverage for that person and we would be replacing them.
- You want to keep every customer conversation entirely in-house as a matter of principle. That is a fair position and a service is the wrong shape for it.
We would rather you read that and go elsewhere than sign up and work it out in a month. If one of those lines is you, the honest answer is that we are not the thing to buy.
Straight answers
What people ask when comparing the two.
Is Paidnice cheaper than Hound?
At low invoice volumes, considerably. Their Essentials tier is about £49 a month for 150 invoices against our £199 a month. Their pricing rises with volume and reaches roughly £199 at around 1,000 invoices a month, at which point the headline figures match and the difference is who does the work.
Does Paidnice chase for me?
It automates the sending: reminders, statements, late fees, on schedules you configure. It is not a service with people in it, so replies, phone calls and the decision to escalate come back to you. That is the design rather than a shortcoming.
Can I use both?
You could, though there is more overlap here than with a risk product, and running two systems that both chase the same invoice is a good way to send somebody two letters on the same morning. If you are already on Paidnice and it is working, the honest advice is to stay there until it stops working.
Do you apply late fees automatically too?
We add statutory interest and fixed compensation under the 1998 Act, calculated per invoice from the day it went overdue, on commercial debts. It is not a general late fee we invented; it is a statutory entitlement you already have and almost never claim. It also belongs to you rather than to us.
Where did these figures come from?
Paidnice's own published pricing page, read on 6 August 2026. They publish in US dollars with sterling shown alongside, so the pound figures here are theirs rather than ours, and currency movement is one more reason to check the live page before deciding.
Start
Hand us the worst one and see what happens.
Debt Rescue is a 60-day trial on a single stuck invoice. Nothing is charged up front, and if we have recovered nothing by day 60 we cancel it ourselves and you are charged nothing at all. That is the entire cost of finding out whether any of the above is true.