Sage Charges €200/month. Cegid Charges €180/month. The Government Portal Is Free.
Sage charges €200/month. Cegid charges €180/month. Pennylane charges up to €149/month. The government portal where they all ultimately send your data is free. You have been paying a private company for access to a public service — every month, for years. There is now a platform that connects you to the same government infrastructure directly, at zero cost.
Every entrepreneur who has seen their renewal notice and briefly wondered "is there a better option?" had the right instinct. This article is the answer they were looking for.
What you're actually paying for
Call it infrastructure rent: paying a private company for access to public services that are free to use directly.
None of these platforms own the DSN channel — the Déclaration Sociale Nominative, the mandatory monthly filing every employer submits to URSSAF, the agency that collects employee social security contributions. They don't own the bank reconciliation API. They don't own the EDI protocol at impots.gouv.fr for tax declarations. They built software that sits in front of these free services and charges you for the view. Liberté removes the middleman. The view is the same. The rent is zero.
Here's what you're actually paying for in a typical subscription. The interface: genuine value, refined over decades. Accountant integrations: genuine value, built over years of relationships. API connections to government portals: minimal cost, free public infrastructure. Compliance updates when regulations change: genuine value, requires ongoing attention. Data storage of your accounting history: minimal cost, standard cloud storage. Now look at your invoice and ask: how much of this €200/month reflects genuine expertise versus the cost of the free infrastructure underneath?
At 80%+ gross margins on SME subscriptions, the cost to serve your account is roughly €40/month — servers, support overhead, compliance update labor. The remaining €160/month is the price of you not having an alternative. Until now, that alternative didn't exist.
The numbers side by side
Software pricing in France: Sage €80–200/month, Cegid approximately €180/month equivalent, Pennylane €14–149/month with €115M in annual recurring revenue and a €3.6B valuation from their January 2026 funding round, Payfit for payroll €6–12/employee/month.
Now the other column. net-entreprises.fr — where DSN and DPAE declarations (the pre-hiring declaration required before every new employee, with a €1,068 fine per undeclared employee if missed) are filed — provides a free, documented direct software connection — meaning your software files without any human portal visit — that processes 28 million declarations per month. PSD2, the EU banking regulation, mandates free access to your bank account data for authorised software. The EDI protocol for tax declarations at impots.gouv.fr is free, requiring EDIFICAS accreditation — the official certification to file taxes this way directly — held by approximately 47 companies currently. Liberté is on that roadmap.
The government built the connections. Software vendors charge you to use them.
The names and the savings
A SARL with 8 employees on Sage at €150/month = €1,800/year, plus accountant fees for work the software doesn't automate. A freelance architect on Pennylane at €49/month = €588/year for invoicing and TVA — both of which Liberté handles via direct government API connections at zero cost. A restaurant using Payfit for payroll (€12/employee/month = €864/year for 6 employees) plus accounting software at €100/month (€1,200/year) = €2,064/year for two platforms that Liberté replaces with one free one.
Over five years, the Sage subscriber spends €12,000. On Liberté, the same business spends €0 plus whatever marketplace services they choose to add. The price inversion is not subtle.
Why the pricing held for this long
Founded in 1981, Sage has maintained a 94% renewal rate — not because customers are satisfied — switching is simply complicated. Forty years of accounting history in their format. Accountants who learned the interface. Workflows built around their specific quirks. The business model works because leaving feels expensive.
Liberté solves the switching cost before it's needed. Accounting history exports in FEC format — the standardised file that French tax authorities accept and that any compliant platform can import. Payroll history exports in standard formats. Bank transaction history stays in your bank. The data migrates. The lock-in dissolves.
You're not paying for accounting expertise. You're paying for someone to use software that resells access to free government APIs. That's not a software subscription. That's infrastructure rent.
Three scenarios before your next renewal
Consider this: your subscription increases from €200 to €250/month at renewal. Do you switch? Most businesses don't — the switching cost (history migration, accountant retraining) keeps 94% of customers in place year after year. Liberté gives you the migration path today, before any price increase, when there's no pressure.
Cegid acquires your payroll software. Subscription terms change. Liberté is independent, built on free public APIs, with no acquisition upside to pursue. Platform pricing is zero because it has to be — that's the business model.
When your accountant retires, their replacement uses different software. If your history is in vendor-specific formats with vendor-specific workflows, the transition is expensive. If your history is in standard FEC format connected to public APIs, any accountant with any modern platform can pick up where the last one left off.
What genuine expertise is worth
These vendors aren't acting in bad faith. They built real products. They handle real complexity. The tension is between the genuine value they provide — making compliance manageable, handling regulatory updates, providing accountant workflows — and the price they charge for the commodity underneath it: API connections to government portals that are free.
Separation is the solution. Platform access is free because the API connections are free. Genuine expertise — complex multi-entity handling, industry-specific modules, AI-powered financial intelligence via Stralevo on the marketplace — that's where paid services belong. You pay for expertise. Not for infrastructure.
Before your next renewal notice
Before the next invoice arrives, export your accounting data in FEC format — every compliant platform can do this. Join the waitlist at liberte.free, launching Q2 2026, France first. Spend 10 minutes listing what your current subscription does that requires more than direct government API access.
That list is what you should be paying for. The rest is infrastructure rent you stopped owing when Liberté launched.