Earn 3.8% APY on every idle euro.
Business banking built for freelancers and small studios. Your money — working, insured, and visible in one calm dashboard.
Free · no minimums · leave anytime
Deposits insured up to €100,000 per the EU Deposit Guarantee Scheme.
0.0B
managed across client accounts
0
freelancers and studios on Brightvault
0.00%
platform uptime, trailing 12 months
The boring parts of money, automated.
Three things eat a freelancer's week: chasing invoices, dreading the tax bill, and watching savings do nothing. Brightvault closes all three.
Invoice in 40 seconds. Get paid 9 days faster.
Create an invoice from any incoming contact, with your VAT details and payment link baked in. Brightvault matches the payment automatically and nudges late payers for you — politely, twice, then firmly.
- EU VAT & reverse-charge handled automatically
- Median time-to-paid on Brightvault: 12 days vs. the EU average of 21
- Reconciliation without spreadsheets
Tax money, quarantined before you can spend it.
Set your rate once — say 24% — and every incoming payment is split automatically into buckets for tax, VAT, and runway. The tax bill stops being a surprise and starts being a number you already have.
- Rules per client, per project, or globally
- Buckets earn the same 3.8% APY while they wait
- One-tap export for your accountant at quarter-end
Yield that shows up every month. Not a teaser rate.
Every euro in every Brightvault account earns 3.8% APY from day one — operating balance, buckets, all of it. Paid out monthly, line-itemed in your statement, no tiers to climb and no 90-day promo cliff.
- Accrues daily, lands on the 1st of each month
- No lock-ups: spend or transfer any time
- Variable rate, published openly — see the calculator below
What would your balance earn?
At 3.8% APY, you'd earn
€950 /year
that's €79.17 landing in your account every month
Assumes the current 3.8% variable APY held for 12 months on a constant balance, interest paid monthly without compounding. The rate is variable and moves with ECB policy; we publish every change 30 days in advance. Yield is paid on balances up to €250,000 per business.
Built like the banks. Run like software.
Polish is nice. Specifics are better. Here is exactly how your money and data are protected.
Encryption, both directions
AES-256 at rest, TLS 1.3 in transit. Card numbers are tokenised — full PANs never touch our application servers. Keys are rotated quarterly in dedicated HSMs.
Strong Customer Authentication
Every payment above €30 requires SCA per PSD2 — biometric or hardware-key confirmation in the app. New payees are verified with IBAN-name matching before the first cent moves.
Audited, externally
SOC 2 Type II renewed annually by Lindqvist & Brouwer Assurance. Penetration tests twice a year by Helder Security (Amsterdam). Reports available under NDA to any customer.
Bug bounty, in public
A standing bounty program with payouts up to €25,000 for critical findings. 142 reports triaged in 2025, median first response under 6 hours. Researchers are credited, not threatened.
38,000 businesses. Two of them, verbatim.
"We moved a six-person studio over in one afternoon. The tax buckets alone save me 11 hours a month of spreadsheet anxiety, and the idle cash earned €2,340 last year. Our old bank paid us a coffee."
Founder, Studio Pell · Antwerp · on Scale
"Invoices used to take me an evening per month — now it's 40 seconds per client and they pay through the link. Late payments dropped from 4 a quarter to basically zero. I check the yield line the way other people check the weather."
Freelance brand designer · Lyon · on Free
Two plans. No asterisk farm.
Both earn the full 3.8% APY. Scale adds the things a growing studio actually hits.
Free
€0 /month, forever
For solo freelancers getting serious.
- 3.8% APY on every euro, day one
- 1 debit card · 3 tax buckets
- 10 invoices per month
- Free SEPA transfers, no per-payment fees
Scale MOST STUDIOS
€9 /month, VAT incl.
For studios of 2–15 with real cash flow.
- Everything in Free, plus:
- 5 team seats with roles · unlimited cards
- Unlimited invoices + auto late-payer nudges
- Accountant access & DATEV/SIE exports
- Human support, median reply 4 min
| Item | Free | Scale |
|---|---|---|
| Yield on all balances | 3.8% APY | 3.8% APY |
| SEPA transfers (in/out, instant) | €0 | €0 |
| Card payments, foreign currency | 0.5% FX | 0.25% FX |
| ATM withdrawals | 2 free/mo, then €1 | 8 free/mo, then €1 |
| Account opening, closing, dormancy | €0 | €0 |
| Hidden fees of any description | none | none |
Our leaving guarantee: close your account in-app in two clicks — no call, no form, no retention script. Your money moves out same-day, and your data is deleted within 30 days on request.
The questions you should be asking.
What happens to my money if Brightvault shuts down?
Honestly: your deposits don't sit with "Brightvault the app." They're held at our partner bank, ClearLedger Bank N.V., where they're protected up to €100,000 per business under the EU Deposit Guarantee Scheme. If Brightvault disappeared tomorrow, the scheme guarantees repayment within 7 working days. Anything above €100,000 would rank as a claim on the bank — which is why we tell customers holding more to ask us about balance-sweeping across partner banks.
Is the 3.8% rate guaranteed?
No — and be wary of anyone who says theirs is. It's a variable rate that tracks ECB policy. What we do guarantee: every rate change is announced 30 days before it takes effect, applied to everyone equally, and shown in the app with the date it changes. No teaser rates, no "new customers only."
Is Brightvault an actual bank?
No. Brightvault Technologies B.V. is a licensed payment institution under PSD2, supervised by De Nederlandsche Bank. Your deposits are held at ClearLedger Bank N.V., a fully licensed EU credit institution. This split is standard for modern business banking — you get the deposit protection of a bank with software a bank would take a decade to ship.
Ten minutes to open an account — really?
Median time from "start" to "active IBAN" was 9 minutes 40 seconds last quarter, for sole proprietors with an EU ID. Multi-shareholder companies take longer — typically 1–2 business days, because we verify every person owning 25%+ (that's anti-money-laundering law, not us being slow). You can prepare invoices and buckets while verification runs.
What does it actually cost? Where's the catch?
Free is €0 forever; Scale is €9/month flat. The full fee table is published above — FX at 0.5% (0.25% on Scale) and ATM withdrawals past your free allowance at €1 are the only per-use charges. We make money on plan fees, interchange when you pay by card, and the margin between wholesale rates and the 3.8% we pass to you. That's the whole model.
How hard is it to leave?
Two clicks, in the app: Settings → Close account. Remaining balance transfers out same-day to any IBAN you name, statements are exported as PDF/CSV before closure, and there is no exit fee. Around 1.1% of customers leave per year; we'd rather earn the other 98.9% than lock anyone in.
Do you sell my transaction data?
No. Not anonymised, not aggregated, not to "trusted partners." Our revenue is plan fees, interchange, and deposit margin — listed in the answer above. Your data is processed under GDPR within the EU, and you can export or request deletion of everything we hold from inside the app.
Your idle cash is losing the race to inflation.
Open your Brightvault account now — we'll email you a secure link that picks up exactly where you leave off.
4.8 from 15,204 App Store ratings · 38,000 businesses on board