A Sole Trader in Bordeaux and a 200-Person Factory in Toulouse Shouldn't Need the Same Software License.
A sole trader who makes €50,000 a year in consulting fees has one compliance obligation: a quarterly revenue declaration to URSSAF (the agency that collects social security contributions) and basic income records. A 200-person manufacturing company has monthly payroll for 200 employees, quarterly TVA (VAT) filings, an annual FEC (the standardized accounting file the tax authority can demand with 15 days' notice), social declarations for every benefit plan, and multi-entity consolidation. French accounting software charges them both roughly the same starting price.
That price is €30-80 per month. For the factory, it's a reasonable cost for genuine complexity. For the solo consultant, it's €720-960 per year to automate 10 minutes of quarterly work.
The mismatch nobody named
France launched the auto-entrepreneur regime — the simplified sole trader status now used by 4 million registered businesses — in January 2009. The explicit goal was to reduce compliance burden for solo traders and freelancers. The government simplified the rules. The private software market didn't simplify its prices.
Under the auto-entrepreneur regime, the compliance footprint is minimal. Auto-entrepreneurs with services revenue below €72,600 don't file TVA — the tax exemption applies automatically. DSN (the monthly social security declaration required from employers) doesn't apply to auto-entrepreneurs. Their social contributions are calculated as a flat rate — 22% for services, 12.3% for goods — applied to their quarterly revenue declaration on autoentrepreneur.urssaf.fr. That declaration takes approximately 10 minutes to file. Four times per year.
Solo electricians, freelance designers, consultants who invoice three clients — their entire annual compliance burden is about 40 minutes of quarterly declarations and basic invoice records. The major accounting software vendors charge them €30-80 per month for a platform built for employers with payroll, complex TVA scenarios, multi-entity management, and 50-employee HR modules.
You shouldn't need a software license designed for a factory just because you do your own books. A baker needs a bread knife, not a commercial kitchen. Liberté is the bread knife — and it's free.
What 4 million people were never told
The auto-entrepreneur portal — autoentrepreneur.urssaf.fr — is free. It handles the quarterly declaration directly. An auto-entrepreneur who uses only this portal pays €0 for their compliance software. The filing is as simple as the regulation: revenue this quarter, contribution calculated automatically, payment confirmed.
What the portal doesn't provide: invoice tracking, bank reconciliation (matching your bank transactions to your invoices automatically), and a clean record of your business finances. Those are genuinely useful for running a business, even a simple one. They're also what the €30-80/month accounting platforms include — wrapped around the 10-minute quarterly declaration to justify the price.
Liberté provides invoice tracking, bank reconciliation via PSD2 open banking (the EU regulation that gives any software free access to transaction data from your bank), and automatic quarterly URSSAF declaration filing. All free. The €720/year that accounting vendors collect from auto-entrepreneurs for this functionality represents a systematic overcharge for the simplest compliance case in the French market.
Missing a quarterly URSSAF declaration isn't without consequences: the penalty is 1.5 times the contribution amount. On a €10,000 revenue quarter at 22%, that's a €330 penalty instead of a €220 contribution. Automated filing prevents this. Free software handles the automation. The choice between €720/year and €0/year for the same compliance protection is the choice most auto-entrepreneurs haven't been offered.
The spectrum Liberté was built for
French compliance is explicitly tiered — the government designed it this way on purpose.
An auto-entrepreneur under the micro-enterprise regime has obligations that fit on a single page. A SAS (a standard French company structure, similar to a private limited company) with 10 employees adds DSN filings, payroll management with France's 200+ mandatory variables (35-hour week calculations, RTT — extra leave days earned by full-time workers — tickets restaurant, mandatory mutuelle), and DPAE pre-hiring declarations required before each new hire starts — missing one costs €1,068 per undeclared employee. A 200-person manufacturer adds multi-entity consolidation, complex convention collective (the sector-specific labor agreement that sets minimum wages and leave entitlements for your industry) variables, and annual audit-ready FEC production.
Each step up that ladder adds real complexity. Cegid and Sage built software for the complex end of that spectrum — and then priced the simpler end the same way, because 4 million auto-entrepreneur subscriptions at €60/month is a €2.88 billion annual market. The software market's response to the government's simplification effort was to charge the simplified customers the same as everyone else.
The platform's model treats the compliance spectrum the way the regulation does: free at every level. An auto-entrepreneur uses invoice tracking and quarterly declaration. A growing SAS adds DSN filings and payroll when they hire their first employee. A 50-person employer adds FEC-compliant accounting and complex HR. The features grow with the business. The platform cost stays at zero.
The switching cost is lower than you think
Most auto-entrepreneurs signed up for accounting software in their first month of business — anxious about compliance, willing to pay for reassurance, trusting the name on the packaging. They set up direct debit. They never revisited the decision. That €60/month became a fixed cost that stopped feeling worth questioning.
Migrating from paid accounting software to Liberté as an auto-entrepreneur requires: exporting invoice history to CSV (approximately 20 minutes), configuring your account with your SIRET number (the 14-digit business registration number on your URSSAF welcome letter) and URSSAF credentials (approximately 30 minutes), and setting up the PSD2 bank connection (approximately 20 minutes). Total: one afternoon. The payback period on that afternoon is the first monthly subscription cancelled — typically within a week.
For employers — businesses with payroll, DSN filings, and full accounting history — the migration is more considered. Liberté doesn't minimize that. The data migration from Sage or Cegid requires more time and attention. For a growing 5-person employer, the right moment is the start of a new fiscal year. For a new hire who hasn't yet set up any platform, the right moment is now.
The same platform, whether you have one invoice or a thousand
Whether you're a solo consultant in Bordeaux or a 50-person employer in Lyon, Liberté is free. Start with the features your business actually needs today — quarterly declaration, invoicing, bank reconciliation — and add more only when your business requires it. The auto-entrepreneur filing quarterly from their kitchen table gets the same free URSSAF connection as the 30-person SAS with monthly DSN obligations.
That's not a segmentation strategy or a freemium model. It's the same thing the government built when it created the auto-entrepreneur regime in 2009: a recognition that businesses aren't all the same size, and compliance tools shouldn't pretend they are.