The free ride ended on 2 March 2026
If you run your billing through Xero, you already know the news. On 2 March 2026 Xero replaced its old free and revenue-share developer model with tiered API pricing. The new plans charge on two things that matter to every PSA vendor: the number of Xero connections, and the gigabytes of data egress you pull through the API. Tiers run from a Starter plan at no cost up to Advanced at $895 per month, each with its own egress allotment, and partners have described annual bills reaching into the tens of thousands.
Here is the part that lands on you: those costs get recovered. Vendors do not eat five figures a year quietly. They pass it through, usually as a fee layered on top of the seat count you already pay for.
Why a multi-tenant PSA generates so much egress
Think about how a cloud, multi-tenant PSA actually behaves. It holds the whole book of business for thousands of MSPs, and it keeps everyone’s Xero data warm in a central cache. To keep that cache fresh it polls and re-syncs aggressively across every connected Xero org, whether or not you ran a billing job today. That is a lot of connections and a lot of egress GBs, and it is exactly the pattern Xero now meters and bills.
You did not ask for a real-time mirror of your ledger. You asked to push an invoice at month-end. But in a shared cache model, the vendor’s sync strategy decides your egress bill, not your workflow.
What single-tenant changes
Opentra is self-hosted and single-tenant. Your instance runs on infrastructure you control and talks to your own Xero connection, for the billing you actually run. At the end of your month-end run, Opentra pushes the invoices you approved. It is not a vendor warehouse re-syncing everyone’s data around the clock to keep a cache alive. Your connection, your egress, your call. See how the integrations are wired on our integrations page.
That matters for GST and VAT jurisdictions too. AU, NZ and UK MSPs on Xero get the same month-end push (multi-currency via Xero) without a metered cloud vendor sitting between you and your own ledger.
Flat means flat
And the pricing stays honest. Opentra is a flat fee: Community is free to self-host, Pro is $149 per month, Opentra Cloud is $249 per month. No per-seat tax, and no surprise egress pass-through layered on top when your PSA vendor’s API bill lands. What you are quoted is what you pay.
When the API tax arrives dressed up as a platform fee, ownership stops being a philosophy and starts being a line item.
Run the numbers on the flat-vs-per-seat calculator, or request early access.