Chaser Alternative: Invoice Chasing Software Compared on Pricing, Features and Compliance

Chaser is an accounts receivable automation platform. Its core job is to chase your unpaid invoices for you: it connects to your accounting software, watches which invoices go past due, and sends scheduled follow-up emails from your own address until the customer pays. Around that core it has built credit control workflows, payment portals, receivables reporting, multi-entity support for businesses running several legal entities, a receivables forecast on its top self-serve plan, and a managed service called Care where a dedicated AR specialist does the chasing on your behalf. Accounts that never pay can be escalated into Chaser's own collections service.

It is a UK-founded company and has been in this market for years, which shows in two places: the depth of its accounting integrations, and the fact that the product is built for finance teams rather than for a single owner with a spreadsheet. Those are real advantages and we are not going to pretend they are not. If your finance function is multi-entity, or your whole stack is organized around one accounting system that Chaser integrates with tightly, that fit is worth paying for.

What Chaser is not is a collection agency in the traditional sense. Its chasing product sends messages in your name, on your behalf, while you remain the creditor. That is the same fundamental model DebtAgent uses, and it is the reason both tools sit in a completely different economic category from an agency that takes a percentage of every dollar it recovers.

Chaser publishes its pricing, which is more than many AR vendors do and is worth crediting. As verified on chaserhq.com/pricing in July 2026, the plans are:

• Compact, from $259 per month. Includes 4 users, 30 follow-up templates and 4 automated receivables workflows. Aimed at businesses under $5 million in annual revenue.
• Core, from $779 per month. Unlimited users, templates and workflows, plus multi-entity support. Aimed at businesses under $13 million in annual revenue.
• Complete, from $1,169 per month. Adds a dedicated account manager, priority support, assisted onboarding and a receivables forecast. Aimed at businesses under $120 million in annual revenue.
• Custom. For anything above that band.

There is also a Care add-on service from $447 per month, which provides a dedicated AR specialist to chase your customers for you. Annual billing saves 10% across the plans.

Two things to note when you budget. First, these are "from" prices, so your quote can land higher. Second, the tiers are banded partly by company revenue, which means a good year can move you from $259 a month to $779 a month without your invoice volume changing much. That is a legitimate way to price software and it usually comes with more capability, but it is worth modeling before you sign an annual contract. Compact at $259 a month is roughly $3,100 a year; Core is closer to $9,300.

Three reasons come up repeatedly, and none of them is that Chaser is a bad product.

Price at the low end. A contractor with forty open invoices and a $60,000 receivables ledger is solving a real problem, but it is not a $3,100-a-year problem in their mind. The entry plan is priced for a finance function, and plenty of businesses looking for invoice chasing software do not have one. They have an owner, a bookkeeper, and a list of people who have not paid.

US compliance emphasis. American businesses chasing American debt care about a specific body of rules: the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act and its state equivalents, the Telephone Consumer Protection Act for calls and texts, and state licensing regimes for anyone acting as a third-party collector. A multi-market platform necessarily spreads its attention across jurisdictions. A US-first tool can write its default sequences around US norms, which is what DebtAgent does.

Simplicity. Some teams want unlimited templates, workflow branching and receivables forecasting. Others want to point a tool at their overdue invoices, approve the wording once, and never think about it again. Buying a platform when you needed a sequence is one of the most common ways to waste a software budget, and the reverse mistake is just as expensive. Be honest about which of the two you are.

A fourth reason shows up occasionally: teams that tried a collection agency first and got a bill for 25% to 50% of every recovered dollar. If that is where you are coming from, read how much collection agencies charge before you compare any two software products, because the numbers reframe the whole exercise.

We would rather you buy the right thing than buy ours. Chaser is the better purchase in at least four situations.

You run multiple entities. Multi-entity consolidation is on Chaser's Core plan and above and it is not something you should try to work around with duplicate accounts and spreadsheets. If you have three trading companies under one group, this alone settles it.

Your accounting system is the center of your process. Chaser's integration depth with accounting platforms is one of its strongest features. If your AR workflow lives inside a specific accounting system and you need chasing status, payment allocation and reporting to stay in sync automatically, that is worth real money.

You want a human, not a system. The Care add-on from $447 a month puts a dedicated AR specialist on your ledger. DebtAgent does not offer that at any price. If the actual constraint is that nobody on your team has time to make follow-up calls, software that drafts better emails is solving the wrong problem.

You are large enough to need forecasting and an account manager. The Complete plan's receivables forecast, assisted onboarding and dedicated account manager are the kind of thing a controller at a mid-market company genuinely uses. At $49 a month you get software, not a relationship.

DebtAgent is built for the US business that has a collections problem and no collections department. Starter is $49 a month, Plus is $149, Pro is $499. All flat, all with no percentage taken from anything you recover. You upload or connect your overdue invoices, the agent drafts a full escalating sequence in your name and your tone, you approve the wording once, and it sends by email and SMS on schedule and stops the moment an invoice is paid.

The compliance posture is the part worth understanding. Sequences are drafted against FDCPA norms: state the amount accurately, do not misrepresent who you are or what will happen, do not threaten action you will not take, honor a request to stop, and keep a clean dated record of every message. Even where the FDCPA does not technically apply to you, those are the standards a court, a customer or a state regulator will measure your conduct against, and following them costs nothing.

The honest summary is this. DebtAgent suits US small and mid-size businesses that want compliant first-party chasing at a low flat price. Chaser suits larger or multi-entity finance teams that need deep ERP and accounting integration or a managed service, and it has a bigger feature surface than we do. Those two sentences cover most of the buying decision.

This distinction is the single most misunderstood thing in the category, and it affects which rules apply to you.

A business collecting its own debt, in its own name, is generally a first-party creditor and is generally outside the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act. The statute is aimed at third-party debt collectors: agencies, buyers of defaulted debt, and law firms collecting for others. There is an important exception. A creditor that collects under a name suggesting a separate outside agency is involved is treated as a debt collector, so inventing a house brand like "National Recovery Bureau" to sound scarier can pull you inside the statute you were outside of a minute earlier.

Two further limits are worth knowing. The FDCPA's definition of debt at 15 USC 1692a(5) covers obligations incurred primarily for personal, family or household purposes, so pure business-to-business debt sits outside it even for third-party collectors, though several states impose their own broader rules. And the Telephone Consumer Protection Act applies to calls and text messages regardless of whether you are a creditor or an agency, which is why consent and stop-request handling on SMS matters even when you are chasing your own B2B invoices.

Both DebtAgent and Chaser's chasing product keep you as the creditor of record, sending in your own name. That is the model that keeps you first-party. The moment you place an account with an agency, or with Chaser's own collections service, the account moves into third-party territory and that party takes on its own licensing and FDCPA obligations. This is information, not legal advice, and you should check with counsel about your specific situation and state.

Migration is less work than people expect, mainly because the valuable asset is your sequence logic, not your data.

Start by exporting your open receivables from your accounting system rather than from the chasing tool. Your accounting system is the source of truth for what is owed, by whom, and since when, and it will export cleanly. Second, screenshot or copy your existing follow-up templates and the day offsets they run on. That cadence is what your team has learned over months of chasing and it should carry over even if the wording changes.

Third, watch the overlap window. The failure mode in every AR migration is a customer receiving a day-15 reminder from the old system and a day-1 reminder from the new one in the same afternoon. Pick a cutover date, pause all automated sequences in the outgoing tool a full day before, and let the new one pick up each invoice at its correct stage rather than restarting everyone at the top.

Fourth, run in parallel on a slice, not on everything. Take twenty invoices for the first two weeks. Check that the wording is something you would sign your own name to, that payments correctly stop the sequence, and that nothing is going to a customer who already settled. Then move the rest. And before you cancel anything, check your renewal date. Annual plans on either side may not be refundable mid-term, and there is no point paying twice for a month you could have timed better.

The invoice chasing software market splits into three groups, and knowing which group you are shopping in saves more time than any feature comparison.

Full AR platforms. Chaser sits here, alongside the larger order-to-cash suites. They cover collections, credit, payments, cash application and reporting. Buy in this group when AR is a department rather than a task, when you have multiple entities, or when integration depth is a hard requirement. Expect four to five figures a year.

Focused chasing tools. DebtAgent sits here. The job is narrow: draft compliant escalating sequences, send them on schedule, stop on payment, keep a record. Buy in this group when you have a defined list of overdue invoices and want them worked properly without hiring anyone. Expect two to three figures a month.

Accounting add-ons. Most accounting systems have basic built-in reminders. They are free and they are better than nothing. They stop being enough at the point where you need escalating tone, multiple channels, or a defensible record of what was sent and when.

Whichever group you land in, the comparison that actually matters is against the alternative you are trying to avoid. A collection agency charges 25% to 50% contingency, which on a $40,000 book of aged debt is $10,000 to $20,000. Working the accounts yourself first, with a proper sequence and a formal demand letter at the end, is what keeps most of those accounts out of the agency's hands. If they still need to go, our guide to choosing a collection agency for a small business covers what to ask before you sign.