Filing your own Self Assessment costs nothing through HMRC’s portal, so any paid software has to earn its keep against £0 on one side and a qualified accountant on the other. If what you want is an accountant on tap all year, not just in January, that is a different product, see our Crunch review. GoSimpleTax sits in the middle lane: software that submits straight to HMRC without you touching the government forms, and without the cost of a full accountant service. This review checks whether that middle lane is worth £69.99 a year, and flags the separate charge most reviews miss.
The short version: GoSimpleTax costs £69.99 a tax year including VAT for the Individual plan, with a free no-card trial, and files the SA100 and most supplementary pages straight to HMRC. The catch: Making Tax Digital for Income Tax is a separate product at £12.99 a month: £155.88 a year, so if MTD applies to you, that is the price to compare rather than £69.99.
Table of Contents
What it actually costs
GoSimpleTax charges per tax year, and every price on its pricing page is stated as including VAT, which makes it directly comparable with an accountant’s quote in a way that most software pricing is not.
| Plan | Subscription | Pay once |
|---|---|---|
| Individual | £69.99/tax year | £113.99/tax year |
| Residency | £85.99/tax year | £129.99/tax year |
| Partnership | £96.99/tax year | £150.99/tax year |
| Two returns | from £119.99/tax year | — |
| Five returns | from £203.99/tax year | — |
| A previous year’s return | — | £113.99 per return |
The gap between the two columns is the thing to notice: paying once for a single year costs £113.99, while staying on the subscription costs £69.99 a year. If you file every year, and as a sole trader you will, the subscription is £44 a year cheaper, and the pay-once price is really the price of leaving.
You can try it before paying. GoSimpleTax offers a no-obligation trial with no card required, so you can enter your figures, see the tax calculation, and decide whether to pay only at the point of submission.
MTD for Income Tax is a separate product
This is the part to get right, and it is not obvious from the plan names. The £69.99 Individual plan is a Self Assessment product rather than a Making Tax Digital one. GoSimpleTax lists MTD for Income Tax separately, at £12.99 a month, signed up through its partner Coconut.
£12.99 a month is £155.88 a year, more than double the Self Assessment plan. If MTD for Income Tax already applies to you, which since 6 April 2026 it does for qualifying income above £50,000, then the number to compare against other software is £155.88 and not £69.99. Our MTD for Income Tax guide covers who is in scope and from when, and the recognised software list is where to check any product’s current status.
What the software does
GoSimpleTax walks you through the return itself instead of the bookkeeping. It covers the SA100 and the supplementary pages most sole traders need. SA102 for employment, SA103 for self-employment, SA105 for UK property, plus SA106, SA107 and SA108 for foreign income, trusts and capital gains. That is a wider set of forms than most of the accountant-assisted services support.
It calculates your liability in real time as you type, so you are not filling in a form blind and waiting for a total at the end, and it flags what it calls 100+ tax-saving tips as you go, prompts aimed at allowable expenses and reliefs people commonly miss. The finished return goes straight to HMRC from the software instead of through the gov.uk portal. GoSimpleTax describes itself as 100% HMRC recognised.
It also connects to Xero, FreeAgent, FreshBooks and SumUp, so if you already track your bookkeeping in one of those you can use GoSimpleTax only for the filing rather than duplicating your records.
Support is email only, Monday to Friday 9am to 5pm, extended to seven days a week through January. That extension is not a coincidence: January is when most sole traders open the software at all, and the week before the 31 January deadline is when you will find out whether email-only support is enough for you.
How it compares to filing free on gov.uk
Filing your own Self Assessment through HMRC’s portal costs nothing, so £69.99 has to buy something real. What it buys is guidance and a running calculation: the portal asks you questions in HMRC’s language and shows you the answer at the end, while GoSimpleTax asks in plainer terms and shows the tax moving as you enter figures.
Against the other direction — Taxfix, formerly TaxScouts, at £99 for its entry tier, the difference is a person. Taxfix puts a qualified accountant between your figures and HMRC. GoSimpleTax puts software there. The £30 gap between them is small enough that the decision should be about which one you need, not which is cheaper.
| Route | Cost | What you get |
|---|---|---|
| gov.uk portal | £0 | HMRC’s own forms, no guidance, no prompts |
| GoSimpleTax | £69.99/year | Guided entry, live tax calculation, direct filing |
| Taxfix entry tier | £99 | A qualified accountant prepares and files it |
Who this suits
GoSimpleTax makes most sense for a sole trader who is comfortable with numbers and confident the situation is reasonably straightforward: one or two income sources, standard allowable expenses, nothing unusual in capital gains or property.
Landlords with rental income alongside self-employment are the common edge case. GoSimpleTax does handle the property pages, but if your rental position involves several properties, furnished holiday lettings or shared ownership, that is exactly where a second pair of eyes earns its fee.
If your first Self Assessment feels daunting, software will not fix that, it will guide you through entering figures you are not sure about. Read our first Self Assessment guide and the trading allowance explainer first: knowing the deadlines and what you can claim matters more than which tool you type it into.
The honest GoSimpleTax verdict
GoSimpleTax is a useful middle option between doing it yourself on gov.uk and paying someone else to do it entirely. It is cheaper than an accountant-assisted service, gives far more structure than the bare HMRC portal, and the free trial means you can see your own numbers in it before spending anything.
Two caveats decide it. It does not replace professional judgement if your affairs are complicated, it will file a wrong figure as obediently as a right one. And if Making Tax Digital for Income Tax applies to you, the product you need is the £12.99-a-month one instead of the £69.99 one. Price it on that basis and compare it against a full accounting package before you commit.
Filing it yourself this year?
HMRC Tax & Expense Mastery 2026/27. Nine modules and eleven working templates that take a UK freelancer from “do I even need to register” to a correct return, with MTD quarters built in.
- Fifteen expense categories, with the trap inside each one (training, clothing, meals, the seven-year pre-trading rule)
- Home and vehicle: flat rate against actual cost, with the £312 break-even worked out and the mileage lock-in rule
- The year-one payments-on-account cash shock, and the routine that stops it landing twice
HMRC does not send a list of what you forgot to claim. Most freelancers leave several hundred pounds of legitimate expenses on the table every single year, and the return still gets filed.
Buying more than one? The Complete Freelancer System, all five for £87, against £215 at full price.
How this review was put together. This is a documentation-based review. The figures come from GoSimpleTax’s own published pricing and help pages and, where relevant, HMRC’s software lists, checked on the date shown at the end of the article. It does not rest on a paid account or on running the product with live client data, and where a point comes from the provider’s marketing rather than something independently checkable, the text says so.
Sources
- GoSimpleTax, pricing, plans, supported SA forms and the MTD product
- HMRC: Self Assessment tax returns
- HMRC, find software compatible with Making Tax Digital for Income Tax
Prices and plan details checked 24 August 2026 on GoSimpleTax’s own pricing page, which states that prices include VAT. HMRC recognition is the provider’s own claim, confirm on HMRC’s software list before relying on it. The Taxfix comparison price is that provider’s current promotional rate and is time-limited. This is general information, not tax advice.