Why "free" business banking isn't — the five meters nobody mentions
Every challenger sells a free business account. Almost all of them meter something. We mapped the five dials — transfers, cash, incoming commission, FX and team cards — and built a calculator to prove it.
Walk through any comparison of UK business bank accounts and the same word does all the work: free. Starling is free. Tide is free. Monzo is free. Mettle, ANNA — free, free, free. Strictly, each claim is true: none of them charges a monthly subscription on the entry tier. Practically, "free" has become the most expensive word in small-business banking, because the subscription was never where the money was.
After scoring eight accounts for our business banking category, we found the cost of each "free" plan is carried on five meters. None are hidden, exactly. All are easy to miss.
The five meters
1 — Transfers. Tide's free plan includes five outbound UK transfers a month; the sixth costs 20p. At 30 transfers a month that is £60 a year you did not model. Revolut Business Basic includes ten, then 20p.
2 — Cash. The great leveller. Starling: 0.7% at the Post Office. Monzo: roughly £1 per PayPoint deposit. Tide: up to 3% at PayPoint. A cash-heavy business pays more on "free" challenger accounts than it would on a £7.50-a-month high-street account within weeks.
3 — Money coming in. ANNA's free plan is unlimited on the way out but charges 0.95% on incoming payments above £1,000 a month. On £8,000 of monthly revenue that is over £800 a year — on a plan advertised at £0.
4 — Foreign exchange. Tide charges 2.75% on FX card spend on the free plan; ANNA 1%; the high street hovers around 2.75–2.99%. Starling and Monzo charge nothing at card level, and Revolut sells interbank rates inside monthly allowances.
5 — Team cards. An expense card for one colleague costs £5 a month on Tide's free tier. Small, until it is three colleagues.
So which account is actually cheapest?
For a digital-domestic business with no cash: Starling or Mettle, at a genuinely honest £0. For cash, the high street regains ground almost immediately. For international flows, Revolut's £10 subscription repays itself in FX savings. These are usage questions, which is why nobody can answer them in an advert.
That is also why we built the business bank cost checker — five inputs from your real month, and the true annual cost of all eight accounts, assumptions shown. Ten minutes in the calculator usually settles a decision that review sites argue about for 4,000 words.
Our full, scored breakdowns live in the business banking reviews — including the protection-model check (FSCS versus safeguarding) that matters more than any fee once your balance grows.