Free accounting software exists and some of it is genuinely useful. The question worth asking is not whether it is free but where the cost has moved to, because it has always moved somewhere.
Zoho Books Free
The strongest free offering available here. A thousand invoices a year, a client portal, bank reconciliation, VAT tracking, recurring invoices, and one accountant seat. It is limited by your annual revenue rather than by crippling features, which is an honest way to structure a free tier.
The cost has moved to the ecosystem. Zoho is happiest surrounded by other Zoho products, and few South African accounting practices are fluent in it. Ask your accountant before committing.
Wave
A real double entry ledger with unlimited invoices, unlimited users and unlimited transactions, at no cost. The financial statements are legitimate and an accountant can work from them.
The cost has moved to your time. No South African VAT201, no supply category treatment, no local bank feeds and no telephone support. Every statement is a manual import. Below the VAT threshold with one bank account this is genuinely fine. The moment you register for VAT it starts costing you your bookkeeper's hours.
Odoo Community
Open source, self hosted, and the licence genuinely costs nothing. Accounting, inventory, purchasing, sales, manufacturing and project management, all included.
The cost has moved to expertise and infrastructure. You provide the server, the backups, the security patching, the upgrades and the person who understands it. For a business with technical capacity this can be excellent value. For a business without it, the free licence is the cheapest part of the total.
The honest test
Free is the right choice when three things are true: you are below the VAT threshold, your transaction volume is low enough that manual work is tolerable, and you have somewhere to grow to when that changes.
Free is the wrong choice when you are VAT registered, when you carry stock, when more than one person needs to work in the books, or when your accountant charges by the hour and the system makes their work harder. In those situations a R220 a month subscription is the cheapest line item in the business.
What free tiers are actually for
Two things. Evaluating properly, with your own data, before you commit budget. And carrying a genuinely small business until it is not small. Both are legitimate. Building a business that will employ fifteen people on a free tier is not, and the migration you will do in year three will cost more than the subscription you avoided.