Collective Review 2026: S Corp Pricing for Solopreneurs

The S Corp plan only pays for itself when the owner's profit is well into five figures. An S Corp saves self-employment tax on the share of profit taken as distributions rather than salary, and the IRS requires a reasonable salary first. On a $60,000 profit there is little left after a reasonable salary, so a bundle costing $4,188 a year billed monthly can cost more than it saves. Collective knows this: its own site sorts prospects by estimated net profit in brackets from under $25,000 to over $150,000 before showing a plan.

Methodology: we read Collective's plans and pricing page, its homepage and its S Corp resource pages, plus the pricing pages of Formations, Bench, Found and Xendoo, on October 17, 2026. Every price on this page is USD and comes from those pages, and the yearly figures are our arithmetic on the printed monthly price and discount. Where a vendor does not print a figure, this review says so.

Toolradar data: Toolradar, the software directory we run, tracks 279 accounting tools as of October 17, 2026, and 26% of them are free, freemium or open source (the accounting ranking). Collective is not one of the free ones, and its price is set by the tax and payroll work bundled in, not by the software, which is the lens for the rest of this review.

Collective is a subscription that runs the back office of a one-person business: formation or a review of an existing entity, monthly bookkeeping, invoicing, quarterly tax estimates, payroll and the tax returns. The homepage aims it at self-employed professionals such as consultants, designers, attorneys and doctors, and says 12,000+ solopreneurs use it.

The product is built around the S Corp election. The plans and pricing page describes the S Corp plan as being for higher earning businesses looking to save on taxes, and that plan is where the election filing (IRS Form 2553), the 1120-S return and payroll sit. The LLC plan is the entry tier for early-stage businesses. A $10,000 average tax savings figure appears on the page, with a footnote that it is based on active users with an S Corp election for the 2022 tax year, so it is a three-year-old average, not a promise for your return.

Collective does not appear in Toolradar's catalog. The closest tracked tools are Bench, Found and QuickBooks, which cover parts of the same job. For the wider market, see best online bookkeeping services.

Start by picking a plan, and the plan decides what Collective files. Both plans include entity formation or a review of an existing LLC, with the member paying state filing fees separately. Both connect up to 5 bank or credit card accounts, reconcile and categorize transactions, produce monthly financial reports and end-of-year tax-ready financials, send quarterly state and federal tax estimates, and include a basic individual tax return and an AI assistant.

The S Corp plan adds the work that makes the election real. Collective files Form 2553, registers you as an employer, runs employee and contractor payroll, helps set a reasonable salary, and files the annual 1120-S business return. It also adds a kick-off meeting with an accountant, live call scheduling and a dedicated account manager. LLC members get email support and the AI assistant, with no live calls listed.

Payroll carries its own fees. The pricing page lists $15 for each employee per month and $5 for each contractor in months you pay them. An S Corp owner is an employee of the corporation, so a one-person S Corp pays at least one employee fee every month on top of the subscription. Add-ons cover health insurance through Solo Health, business insurance through CoverDash, bookkeeping catch-up, late election relief and standard or advanced individual returns.

Billing is monthly or yearly with 15% off the yearly option. The pricing page prints no free trial, no setup fee and no cancellation terms, so confirm the commitment and refund policy with Collective before you pay. For the mechanics of paying yourself once the election is in, read how to pay yourself from an LLC.

Collective prints two prices and one discount. Its pricing page, read on October 17, 2026, lists the LLC and S Corp plans at the prices in the table below, with a Save 15% toggle for yearly billing. State filing fees are paid by the member, and payroll adds the per-employee and per-contractor fees described above.

The year-one math for a solo S Corp owner runs like this. Billed monthly, the S Corp plan costs $4,188 a year. Billed yearly at 15% off it costs about $3,560. One owner on payroll adds $180 a year in employee fees. A first-year total of roughly $3,740 billed yearly, or $4,368 billed monthly, before state fees, is the number to beat with payroll tax savings. The LLC plan runs $2,388 a year billed monthly, or about $2,030 billed yearly, and buys bookkeeping, estimates and a basic personal return, not the election.

The alternatives price the job differently. Formations lists its S-Corp Management tier at the starting price in the table, or from $350 a month on the yearly rate, on a 12-month commitment, and its LLC Management tier at $219 a month. Bench starts bookkeeping at the same monthly price as Collective's LLC plan for businesses under $250K in revenue and sells tax filing separately at $300 a month, with no S Corp support listed. Found is free for banking and bookkeeping, with Found Plus at $35 a month, and files no returns. Xendoo starts at $395 a month, or $355 on the annual rate, and adds business tax returns from $1,295 a year. The Found review and QuickBooks Solopreneur review cover the cheaper do-it-yourself end.

Collective fits a single-owner business with no employees other than the owner, a net profit high enough to justify an S Corp, and no appetite for juggling a bookkeeper, a payroll app and a tax preparer. The typical member is a consultant or practitioner billing clients directly, who wants one monthly bill and one account manager. If that is you, compare the yearly S Corp price against your estimated self-employment tax savings before signing, using Collective's own net-profit brackets as a sanity check.

Skip it if profit is modest or the entity is already handled. An owner under the breakeven keeps more by paying for bookkeeping alone: Found's free plan or Bench Bookkeeping Light, with a tax preparer at filing time. An owner who already has an S Corp and payroll through another provider is paying Collective for work that is done. And a business with a second employee or more than 5 bank accounts should ask Collective how the fees and limits scale, because the page does not say. For formation only, see best LLC formation services and how much it costs to start an LLC; for a non-US founder, the doola review covers the same bundle shape.