If you're shopping for something to chase your overdue invoices, two names come up almost immediately: Chaser and Paidnice. They're both good products. They're also built for different buyers, and the gap between them is where most agencies get stuck — one is priced for a finance department, the other is priced for a small business but shaped around bookkeeping rules rather than client relationships.
This is an honest comparison of both, plus where FetchDue fits. We build FetchDue, so read the last section with that in mind. Everything about Chaser and Paidnice below comes from their own published pricing pages, read on 19 July 2026, and linked so you can check the numbers yourself.
The short version
Chaser is the enterprise end. Mature receivables reporting, phone-call escalation, commercial credit checking, and an optional human service where a real AR specialist works your ledger. Entry pricing is $259/month USD and it rises with your revenue.
Paidnice is the rules engine. Late fees, interest, prompt-payment discounts, statements, and reminder sequences — configured once on Xero or QuickBooks and left to run. Entry pricing is $69/month USD for 150 invoices.
FetchDue is an agent rather than a scheduler. It drafts each chase in your voice, sends from your own mailbox, reads what the client writes back, and drafts the reply — including a payment plan when someone asks to split. Pro is $29/month.
If you want a rule to fire on day 30, Paidnice is the cheaper, more mature version of that. If you have a finance team and need credit checks and call escalation, Chaser is the serious tool. If the actual work eating your week is reading replies and writing responses, that's the specific problem FetchDue is built for.
Chaser: what you get and what it costs
Chaser is the most established product of the three. It's a full receivables platform: scheduled reminder workflows, receivables reporting and forecasting, SMS and phone-call credits, and built-in commercial credit checking so you can vet a customer before extending terms.
Pricing is revenue-tiered, from chaserhq.com/pricing on 19 July 2026:
- Compact — from $259/month USD (£199, AUD 399). Four users, 30 follow-up templates, 4 automated workflows. For revenue under $5M.
- Core — from $779/month USD. Unlimited users, templates and workflows, plus multi-entity support. For revenue under $13M.
- Complete — from $1,169/month USD. Adds a dedicated account manager, assisted onboarding, priority support, and receivables forecasting.
- Care — an add-on service from $447/month USD, where a Chaser AR specialist makes the calls, manages the inbox, and handles dispute resolution for you.
Chaser's real moat is the phone. Almost nothing else in this category will actually call your late payers, and for some debts a call is the only thing that works. Credit checking is the second genuine differentiator — if you extend terms to new commercial clients regularly, being able to check them first is worth real money.
The catch for an agency: the revenue tiering means your bill goes up because your agency grew, not because you're chasing more invoices. And at $259/month entry, a five-person shop is paying enterprise pricing for a tool where they'll use a fraction of the reporting surface.
Paidnice: what you get and what it costs
Paidnice is well-regarded AR automation for small businesses on Xero and QuickBooks, and it's the closest thing to a category default for SMBs. It's a rules engine: you configure the policy once, and it enforces it.
That policy surface is genuinely deep — automatic late fees, compounding interest, prompt-payment discounts, monthly statement runs, escalating reminder sequences, a customer portal, and multi-currency support.
Pricing, from paidnice.com/pricing on 19 July 2026:
- Essentials — $69/month USD. 150 invoices monitored, 600 emails sent, up to 2 team members.
- Pro — tiered by invoice volume with unlimited users: $99/month for up to 300 invoices, $179 for 600, $279 for 1,000, and up through $799/month for 4,000. Adds custom email domain, sender profiles, payment plans, webhooks, and multiple entities.
- Custom — from $999/month USD for 4,000+ invoices, with custom integrations and a dedicated account manager.
- SMS reminders are billed per message on top.
Paidnice's real strength is enforcement. If you want late fees applied consistently without you having to be the bad guy each time, this is the cleanest way to do it. The Xero integration in particular is mature in a way newer tools aren't.
The catch for an agency: it's a timer, not a conversation. The rule fires on day 30 regardless of what your client said on day 28. And note that the $69 entry is capped at 150 invoices and 600 emails across two seats — "flat pricing" here still steps up with volume, just on invoice count rather than revenue.
Where the two actually differ
Strip away the feature lists and the split is this:
Buyer. Chaser is sold to finance teams with a receivables function. Paidnice is sold to small businesses and their bookkeepers. If you have a controller, look at Chaser. If your ops lead does invoicing on Fridays, Paidnice is the more realistic fit.
Pricing model. Chaser scales with your revenue. Paidnice scales with your invoice count. For an agency with a handful of large retainer clients — few invoices, big amounts — Paidnice's volume model is much kinder. For a shop with many small invoices, the opposite.
Escalation. Chaser can put a human on the phone, through Care or through its own call credits. Paidnice escalates through email and SMS. If your late payers ignore email as a category, that difference decides it.
Enforcement depth. Paidnice's fee, interest and discount logic is more configurable than Chaser's. If your whole strategy is "make late cost something," Paidnice does that better and for a quarter of the price.
What neither one does
Both products send. Neither one reads.
That sounds like a small distinction until you look at where your time actually goes. The reminder isn't the work — the reminder takes four seconds. The work is what arrives afterward:
"Can we push this to the 15th?" "Can we split it across three months?" "We never got the invoice — can you resend?" "We're disputing the last two line items."
Every one of those needs a human to read it, work out what it means for your book, decide what you're willing to accept, and write a reply that keeps the client. A rules engine does none of that. It fires the next reminder on schedule — sometimes at the client who just told you they'd pay Friday, which is worse than sending nothing.
So you end up with automation that handles the easy half and hands you the hard half, still unsorted.
Where FetchDue fits
FetchDue is built for that second half. It's an AI collections agent, and the difference from a scheduler is what happens after the send.
It works your overdue list from your own books — QuickBooks, Xero, or Stripe — and sends from your own mailbox, so the chase arrives from the address your client already knows, in your voice, not from a platform template.
When the client replies, the agent reads it and acts on what they actually said. A request to split becomes a drafted installment plan with real dates for you to approve. A promise to pay is tracked against its date and followed up if it slips. A dispute goes straight back to you. Late fees are here too, applied firmly and clamped to your state's legal ceiling.
You approve every send. Nothing reaches a client without your tap — that's a deliberate constraint, because for an agency the person chasing the invoice is usually the person running the relationship.
Pricing is Free to add and track invoices by hand, $29/month for Pro where the agent does the chasing, and $149/month for Firm if you're running collections across many agency clients from one console. There's a 14-day trial with no card.
Be honest about what we don't have. FetchDue won't call your late payers — Chaser will. We don't do commercial credit checks — Chaser does. Our fee and interest configuration isn't as deep as Paidnice's, and Paidnice's Xero integration has years on ours. If those are your requirement, buy the tool that has them.
Picking one
Buy Chaser if you have a finance function, need credit checking before extending terms, or need someone making calls — and the revenue-tiered pricing is affordable at your size.
Buy Paidnice if enforcement is the whole strategy. You want late fees and interest applied automatically and consistently on Xero or QuickBooks, and you don't need the replies handled.
Buy FetchDue if you're an agency, the chase has to protect the relationship, and the real backlog is the replies — reading them, working out the plan, and writing the answer.
Common questions
Is Paidnice cheaper than Chaser? Yes, substantially, at the entry level — $69/month against $259/month USD as of 19 July 2026. But they scale on different axes: Paidnice by invoice volume, Chaser by your revenue. At high invoice counts Paidnice's Pro tiers reach $799/month, so run the numbers against your actual book.
Does Chaser or Paidnice write the follow-ups for me? Both give you templates and let you customize them, and both send on a schedule you configure. Neither reads the replies and drafts a response to what the client said — that's the specific gap FetchDue is built to fill.
Can any of these send from my own email address? Paidnice supports a custom email domain on its Pro tiers. FetchDue sends from your connected mailbox directly, so replies land in your inbox and every chase sits in your Sent folder. Check Chaser's current setup with them.
Which is best for a small agency? If you have few, large invoices and email works on your clients, Paidnice at $69 or FetchDue at $29 will both beat Chaser on price. Choose between them on whether your problem is enforcement (Paidnice) or the reply-handling workload (FetchDue).
Do I have to move my invoicing? Not for any of the three — they all read invoices from the accounting system you already use. FetchDue connects to QuickBooks, Xero, or Stripe and leaves your invoicing exactly where it is.
Chaser and Paidnice pricing verified against their own pricing pages on 19 July 2026. Prices change; check the source links before deciding. See also FetchDue vs Chaser, FetchDue vs Paidnice, and how FetchDue works.