We recommended QuickBooks 27 days before it left India; Zoho Books is ₹749 a month

01The accounting tool we recommended was already leaving

Intuit announced on 1 July 2022 that it would pull QuickBooks from India, with the decision first reported to take effect on 31 January 2023.² Its final notice set the date at 30 April 2023, after which QuickBooks product and service offerings for accountancy and small business customers would no longer be available in India, and the India app marketplace closed with them.¹ Our post recommending QuickBooks went up on 3 April 2023.

02Books: one desk costs the same either way; three desks do not

The two products most Indian SMBs choose between now are TallyPrime and Zoho Books. They price on different logic. Tally sells a perpetual licence, Silver for a single PC at ₹22,500 and Gold for multi-user access at ₹67,500, each with one year of Tally Software Services included, or rents the same software by the month or year: Silver at ₹750 a month or ₹8,100 a year, Gold at ₹2,250 a month or ₹24,300 a year, all plus 18% GST.³ Zoho Books sells a subscription per organisation: Standard at ₹749 a month billed annually with three users, Professional at ₹1,499 with five, and higher tiers up to Ultimate at ₹7,999, exclusive of tax.⁴

The chart hides the real decision, which is who keeps the books. Most Indian SMBs share their accounts with an outside chartered accountant. If the accountant works in Tally, a Silver licence on the accounts desk and data shared with the CA is the cheapest route. If three or four people in the business need to raise invoices and see receivables at once, Zoho Books Standard covers them for about 37% of the price of Tally Gold rented over the same three years, before any Zoho user add-ons at ₹150 a user a month billed annually.⁴

Two smaller differences matter more than the headline price. Tally’s page lists e-invoicing, e-way bills and its connected services on every plan, rented or perpetual, but on a perpetual licence those connected features depend on keeping Tally Software Services current after the first year, so the “buy once” figure is the floor, not the total.³ Zoho Books, for its part, lists managing e-invoices from Standard upward and scales by plan rather than by headcount, so the jump from three users to five is a tier change, ₹749 to ₹1,499 a month, not a per-seat creep.⁴ Either way, ask your accountant which one they already use before you compare anything else; the cost of an accountant working in a system they dislike does not appear on either price list.

03Projects: Trello is free until the eleventh person

Trello’s free plan is for up to 10 collaborators per Workspace, with 10 boards and 250 automation command runs a month. Standard is US$5 a user a month billed annually, or US$6 monthly, and lifts the board limit and raises automation to 1,000 runs. Premium is US$10 annually or US$12.50 monthly and adds views and admin controls.⁵ For a ten-person team that is a clean step: nothing, then US$600 a year, then US$1,200.

What pushes a small team off the free plan is rarely the headcount. It is the tenth board, or the 251st automation run in a month once someone discovers that cards can move themselves. Count both in a normal month before upgrading. The original post’s case of a marketing agency finishing projects “faster and with fewer errors” on Trello had no baseline, and we have dropped it; a free plan is cheap enough to test against your own.

04Automation: Zapier bills the work, not the seat

Zapier’s free plan includes 100 tasks a month and two-step Zaps. Professional is listed as “starting from $19.99 /month” with multi-step Zaps, premium apps and webhooks; Team starts at US$69 a month with 25 users and SAML single sign-on. The page says paying yearly saves 33%, and that every step in a Zap, including AI steps and code, draws from one shared pool of tasks.⁶ The task selector runs from 100 to 2 million tasks a month, so the starting price is the price of the smallest paid tier, not of your workload.

That is not an argument against Zapier. It is an argument for checking whether the two systems already talk to each other. Zoho Books, Zoho CRM and the rest of the Zoho suite share data natively, and Tally has its own connected services; a native integration costs nothing per order. Pay for task-based automation for the joins your main systems cannot make themselves.