Who this plan is for
Free suits sole traders and newly formed limited companies with light transaction volumes — a handful of invoices raised, a handful of supplier payments sent, and no team of cardholders to manage. It's also the sensible starting point for anyone unsure what their real monthly volume will be, because you can watch a month of actual data before committing to a subscription you might not need.
It is not aimed at businesses moving money daily, taking cash regularly, or paying several people abroad. Those patterns get expensive fast on a pay-as-you-go structure, however small each individual fee looks.
What you get, and what you don't
You get the full current account, card, invoicing, receipt capture, accounting integrations and Instant Saver access — the underlying product is the same across every tier. What you don't get is a transfer allowance: every inbound and outbound transfer beyond whatever Tide currently exempts is charged per item. You also don't get the included team cards or the improved FX terms that sit on Smart and above.
The step up to Smart mainly buys you a monthly bundle of free transfers rather than new functionality. If your feature list stops at invoicing and card spending, Free already has what you need.
Where the cost actually bites
- Per-transfer fees on outbound payments — the biggest variable, because it scales directly with how often you pay people.
- Per-deposit charges if you pay in cash at a Post Office or PayPoint counter, regardless of the amount deposited.
- Per-cheque charges for cheque deposits through the app.
- Additional card charges once you need a second cardholder, since Free doesn't bundle team cards.
- FX margin on any international payment, which tends to be least favourable on the entry tier.
Working out your real monthly cost
The arithmetic is simple: count your outbound transfers in a typical month, count your cash and cheque deposits separately, then multiply each by the current per-item fee shown on our plans and fees page. Add any FX payments at the current margin. That total is what Free actually costs you — compare it against Smart's monthly fee plus whatever falls outside Smart's allowance before deciding either way.
A business sending three or four payments a month and never depositing cash will often find Free cheaper than any subscription. A business sending twenty transfers a month is usually paying more in per-item fees than a membership fee would cost, even before cash and cheques are added.
When to upgrade
Upgrade when your counted transfer volume, priced at the current per-item rate, exceeds what a Smart membership costs — or when you take on a second person who needs their own card and controls. Don't upgrade speculatively; run one real month on Free first, because guessed volumes are usually wrong in one direction or the other.
Limitations worth knowing before you open
Tide is not a bank; the account sits with a partner, and protection arrangements are different from a deposit at a licensed bank — check our safety pages if a large balance matters to you. Support is 24/7 in-app but without the priority queueing that paid tiers get. And because Free has no included allowance, irregular months with a burst of payments can produce an unexpectedly large fee total.
How REFER200 fits with the Free plan
The REFER200 campaign attaches to opening a Tide business current account, not to any particular plan. You don't need to take out Smart, Pro or Max to pursue the up to £200 cashback — the card-spend step and the Instant Saver step both work from the Free plan. Choose your plan on cost and features, and treat the offer as a separate decision layered on top.