Puzzle prices per company rather than per employee, so headcount does not move the bill. The pricing page checked on 6 September 2026 lists four tiers billed annually: Starter at 25 dollars a month, Core at 60, Complete at 100 and Scale at 300, with monthly equivalents of 30, 72, 120 and 360. Users are capped at 1 on Starter and 5 on Core, and are unlimited from Complete upward.

A 25 person startup that wants accrual books with revenue recognition, class and department tracking and the AI accuracy review lands on Complete at 100 dollars a month, or 1,200 dollars a year. Two costs sit outside that number. A second entity means the Joiin add on, which Puzzle prices from 23 dollars a month billed annually. AI Close appears as an add on on every plan card with no published price, and accounting firms are told to contact Puzzle for partner pricing.

Agent usage is metered. The pricing page states that each AI action uses 1 credit, with 25 lifetime credits on Starter and Core, 100 a month on Complete and 300 a month on Scale. No overage rate is published, so a team planning to run close agents every month should ask for one in writing.

The pricing page advertises a 14 day free trial with full access to the Complete plan, says data is kept when the trial converts, and states that plans can be changed at any time and cancelled at any time. The advertised prices are the annual rates; paying monthly costs roughly 20 percent more on every tier.

The 50 percent faster close guarantee is the only refund mechanism published. It allows a refund of Puzzle subscription fees requested within 30 days, and up to 90 days from the original subscription date, if the second month close is not at least 50 percent faster. It applies only to single entity structures, requires onboarding and a setup call within 7 days, requires every primary source connected through supported live API integrations rather than CSV or PDF uploads, and excludes third party fees, implementation fees, taxes and pass through costs.

One gap matters for a controller. The document published at puzzle.io/legal/terms-of-service is headed as terms for access to and use of the website and was last revised on 1 June 2023. It is not a subscription agreement, so notice periods, uptime commitments, data export on exit and the security terms behind the SOC 2 claim cannot be read before signing. Ask for the master agreement and the current SOC 2 report.

Puzzle is bought and set up self serve. The pricing page offers a 14 day trial of the Complete plan, self guided QuickBooks migration on Core, and white glove QuickBooks migration on Complete and above. There is no partner led implementation project of the kind a mid market ERP requires.

Two published data points frame the effort. The Brex case study on the api-mcp page reports that FinFuego cut accounting setup from 6 hours to 1.5 hours through the one click Brex integration, and VentureBeat is quoted on the same page saying the integration reduces startup accounting setup from a weeks long process to a single click. Both accounts come from the vendor and its partner.

The real timing constraint is the guarantee. It requires onboarding and a setup call within 7 days of subscription start, every primary source connected through supported live API integrations, and one full monthly close cycle with Puzzle as the primary general ledger before the saving is measured. On the firm side, the 9 July 2026 launch post says Accountalent, a firm of 25 years with more than 7,500 startup clients, cut its close from 15 to 20 days down to 3 to 5 days. That is a vendor account and no independent verification of it was found.

Partly, and the split is deliberate. Puzzle publishes a first party MCP server, and the api-mcp FAQ states that every MCP connection is strictly read only and user permissioned, re authenticates every 5 days for security, and is rate limited during the current alpha. Claude Desktop, Claude.ai, Cursor and Windsurf are named as supported clients. The page argues that Puzzle's own agents are deterministic and so are trusted to write, while third party language models are probabilistic and so get read access only.

Writing happens through the REST API instead. The developer documentation index lists 81 API reference entries covering transactions, journal entries, bills, invoices, vendors, customers, payroll, documents, departments, locations, products and financial statements, with OAuth 2.0 plus PKCE authorization and a documented sandbox server at staging.southparkdata.com alongside production at api.puzzle.io. Write scopes include write:journal, write:transaction, write:bill, write:invoice and write:payroll.

Two limits apply. Credentials are issued by request through the Puzzle API team rather than self serve, and no webhooks appear anywhere in the documentation index, so an integration polls rather than subscribes. Inside the product, the 9 July 2026 launch post says AI Close drafts the work and nothing posts to the general ledger without a human sign off.