$79 for one read, against a subscription.
Two bills, side by side, with the source and the date under every figure. Including the part most comparison pages leave out: these are not the same purchase.
The two numbers
Keystone's price is on our pricing page. Heard's is on theirs, read on the date shown beside it. Neither figure is a quote, an estimate, or a number somebody told us.
Those two numbers do not buy the same thing, and a page that pretended otherwise would not be worth reading. Heard sells labor: people who keep your books, run your payroll and file your returns. Keystone sells a read: it tells you what the numbers you already have are saying. An owner can sensibly buy both, and plenty should.
So the comparison worth making is narrower than service against service. It is this: if what you want to know is whether each clinician pays for themselves once their real costs are loaded on, what does finding that out cost you, and from whom.
Show the arithmetic
| Plan | Published price | One year | 3 years |
|---|---|---|---|
| Keystone, the full read | $79 onceour pricing page | $79 | $79 |
| Heard LiteTheir entry plan. Their page describes bookkeeping, quarterly tax estimates, monthly reports, S corp election guidance and access to their banking product. Annual tax filing is not in this plan. | $129/mo (billed annually)Heard's pricing page, checked 2026-08-15 | $1,548 | $4,644 |
| Heard EssentialTheir page describes everything in Lite plus personal income tax preparation and filing. | $169/mo (billed annually)Heard's pricing page, checked 2026-08-15 | $2,028 | $6,084 |
| Heard PremiumTheir page describes this as the plan built for S corporations and group practices, adding business income tax preparation and filing and S corp compliance. This is the plan their page aims at a group practice. | $255/mo (billed annually)Heard's pricing page, checked 2026-08-15 | $3,060 | $9,180 |
Charges that are not part of a plan
- Annual tax filing on the Lite plan: $750 one-time Heard's pricing page, checked 2026-08-15
- Catch-up bookkeeping for months not yet reviewed: $99 per month of history Heard's pricing page, checked 2026-08-15
- Payroll, on the Premium plan: $39 + $6/person each month Heard's pricing page, checked 2026-08-15
What their pages do not publish
- Their pricing page says annual subscribers save 15 percent against monthly billing, and does not publish the monthly figures themselves. So the month-to-month price of any plan is higher than the number in the table, by an amount only they can state. We have not put a monthly figure in their column, because it would be ours and not theirs.
- Their pages describe live tax consultations as available at extra cost without naming the cost.
What this arithmetic assumes
- Every figure is the price the company publishes on its own page, on the date shown. Nothing is estimated.
- Prices are held flat across the years shown. Neither company has promised to hold a price, so read the multi-year column as arithmetic rather than a forecast.
- Optional add-ons are listed separately and are not folded into any total. Folding an add-on somebody may never buy into a headline number is how a fair comparison stops being one.
What each bill actually closes
The clearest way to compare two bills is to ask what question each one settles. Here is a practice owner's list, run past both. Everything in the Heard column is what their own pages describe; where they do not describe something, the row says that rather than guessing at it.
| The question | Heard | Keystone |
|---|---|---|
| Are my books current, and are my returns filed? | That is the job they sell. Their pages describe recorded and categorized transactions, monthly financial reports, and business and personal federal and state returns prepared and filed. | Not sold here, at any price. Keystone never touches your books and never files anything. |
| What does the practice look like on paper? | Their home page names a profit and loss statement and a balance sheet, available on demand. | The free Snapshot shows the practice-level shape from your own export, in your browser, with nothing uploaded. That part costs nothing and is not a trial. |
| Does each clinician pay for themselves once their share of the costs is loaded on? | Their published pages do not describe a per-clinician read. | That is the product. It is the only question Keystone is built around. |
| What can the practice actually afford to pay me? | Their home page names an owner-allocation guide across taxes, savings and pay, which divides up what has already arrived. | Keystone works the other direction: what the practice can sustain once every seat carries its own loaded cost, which is a different number from a share of this month's deposits. |
| What happens to my numbers if I stop paying? | Their home page describes exporting everything to share with your accountant. | The free tier does not shrink, your files were always yours, and there is no export to request because nothing was taken. The pledge below says where each of those is written down. |
| What does it cost? | Between $1,548 and $3,060 a year at the prices published on this page. | Free to see the shape. $79 once for the exact group read, $39 once for the solo one. No subscription. |
A fair reading of that table is that most of it is not a contest. Four of the six rows describe two different jobs, and if the job you need done is bookkeeping and filing, this page has already answered your question. The row that is a contest is the third one, and it is the reason the rest of this page exists.
If you are leaving, the history does not have to stay behind
The thing that keeps owners on a bookkeeping subscription longer than they meant to is rarely the bookkeeping. It is the suspicion that cancelling takes the picture of the practice with it, and that starting over somewhere else means starting from this month.
It does not have to. Your practice software holds the revenue and your books hold the expenses, and those two exports are enough to rebuild a per-clinician history month by month. Keystone has a page that does exactly that, in your browser, with client data stripped before any number renders and nothing uploaded at any point.
Heard does real work: bookkeeping, taxes, payroll. Nothing here argues with that, and leaving is not the only sensible answer to any of this. This section is for the owners who have already decided.
What you are promised here, and where it is written down
A comparison page is a bad place to invent a promise, because a promise made to win an argument is a promise nobody has costed. So nothing in this section is new. Every line is already in force somewhere else on this site, and each one says where.
- Thirty days, no questions
- If the full Snapshot does not show you something worth more than you paid, email support within 30 days of your purchase and it is refunded, no questions. You keep any Snapshot you have already generated. That is the terms page, not a sentence written for this one.
- The free tier does not shrink
- The free tools and the free Snapshot stay free. Paying gets you the exact read on your real books, kept and shareable, plus the ranked moves. It does not get you back something that was taken away, because nothing is going to be taken away.
- Nothing to leave behind
- The free read runs in your browser on a file you already had. No account is required to use it, nothing of yours is sitting on a server you would have to ask for, and there is no export to request on the way out.
The guarantee, in the terms · The free-forever list, straight from the registry · What the one-time price includes
Could you not just ask an AI assistant?
You can, and for a lot of this you should. Paste your figures into any good assistant and it will do arithmetic that used to cost an accountant's hour. We are not going to pretend otherwise, and Keystone's calculators are published as a public API partly so an assistant can call them directly and cite what comes back.
Where it gets thin is not the arithmetic. It is the inputs. A per-clinician answer needs four things per seat: the clinical hours actually held, the pay arrangement in force, the employer taxes riding on top of it, and that seat's share of the overhead the practice pays whether or not anyone shows up. Almost no owner has those four things in one place, which is why the answer that comes back is usually a worked example with plausible numbers in it rather than a read of the practice.
So the honest test is not this tool against an assistant. It is the one you can run in the next ten minutes: take the year-end package your bookkeeping service already sent you, and find out which of those four things it contains.
Where these figures came from
Every Heard figure on this page was read off one of their own public pages on the date shown. Nothing here came from a sales conversation or a third-party roundup. If one of these has moved, tell us at support@keystonepractice.co and it gets corrected.
- Heard's pricing page, checked 2026-08-15
- Heard's home page, checked 2026-08-15
- Heard's how-it-works page, checked 2026-08-15
- Heard's tax-services page, checked 2026-08-15
Heard is a trademark of its owner. This page is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or reviewed by them. Last checked 2026-08-15.
Cite this page
Link to this page and attribute it to Keystone Practice:
Keystone Practice. "Keystone vs Heard: What Each One Costs a Therapy Practice" https://keystonepractice.co/compare/heard