How it compares

Two different things get called the alternative. Upsolve serves the filer directly. NextChapter and Best Case sell petition software to the office. This page covers both, including what the paid ones cost.

Upsolve is good, and it is not competing with this. It serves the filer. This serves the office representing the filer.

Upsolve is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit with a free web app that helps a person prepare their own Chapter 7 petition and file it without a lawyer. It has helped a very large number of people who had no other option, and if the person in front of you fits it, send them there.

The reason to look at something else is that Upsolve has to say no to a lot of people. It is built for the simple pro se case, and it screens out the rest by design — sensibly, because those cases need a lawyer. Those are exactly the cases that land on a clinic’s desk.

These are Upsolve’s own published eligibility limits, taken from their FAQ.

It is your software, on your server

Upsolve is a hosted service. Your client’s answers go to their servers under their privacy policy and their retention rules, which is a normal thing for a consumer service and an awkward thing for a law office with its own duty of confidentiality and its own records policy.

BankruptcyClinic installs on a machine you control. The client data never leaves it. If your funder, your bar, or your insurer asks where client financial records live, the answer is a server with your name on it.

It assumes a lawyer is in the room

Upsolve is careful to say it is not a lawyer, not a petition preparer, and gives no legal advice — it has to be, because it hands the tool directly to the filer.

BankruptcyClinic makes the opposite assumption. It is built for a clinic, a legal aid office, or a firm, where someone licensed is reviewing the petition and signing off. So it can do things a consumer tool cannot responsibly do: show which exemption statute a claim is being made under, flag that a claim exceeds its cap, apply the 730-day domicile rule, and produce Form 2030 disclosing attorney compensation.

You can change it

Licensed under the AGPL-3.0, and the parts you would want to change are the parts that are easiest to change. State exemptions are a plain Python dictionary of statute, cap, and description. Courts and counties are lists. Adding a state is filling in a table, not rewriting the engine. A hosted service, however good, is a thing you use as shipped.

The licence asks one thing back: if you change it and run your version as a service other people use, publish your changes. Running it as shipped asks nothing.

It produces the whole packet, not a subset

Twenty-one Official Forms, the continuation sheets, and the creditor mailing matrix, all from one interview.

The other thing a clinic compares this against is commercial petition software. The two that matter are NextChapter and Best Case, which is owned by Stretto and has been the incumbent for decades.

These are the vendors’ own published list prices, read from their pricing pages on 6 September 2026. Both auto-renew. Check the current figures before you quote them to a board.

Neither vendor caps you at those numbers. NextChapter includes six users and charges $99 a year for each one after that, and prices its cheaper tiers by case count — $159 covers four cases, $649 covers eleven. Its Chapter 13 module, document creator, client portal, noticing, and texting are separate annual add-ons from $200 to $500 each. Best Case charges $500 for each desktop seat past the third and $170 to $370 for a custom Chapter 13 plan per jurisdiction. Filing fees, credit counselling courses, credit reports, and noticing are extra on both.

Neither publishes a nonprofit, legal aid, or law school clinic rate. We looked. A discount may exist if you ask; nothing public tells you what to expect, which makes it hard to put a number in a grant application.

When the free option is genuinely the better one

The money argument only works if the fit is real. It usually is when:

• Chapter 7 is what you do. A clinic that has never filed a 13 is paying a four-chapter price for a one-chapter need.
• Your volunteer roster is larger than your case count. Per-seat pricing punishes the exact staffing model a law school clinic uses: twenty students, forty cases a year. There are no seats here to count.
• You need it to work the way your intake works. A licence buys the software as shipped. This one you can change, and the changes you make are yours.
• Someone will ask where the client data lives. The answer is a server with your name on it, which is a shorter conversation with a funder than a vendor’s privacy policy.

Where it stops working is a small firm that files across many states and chapters and wants one vendor to call. That is what the commercial packages are for, and $1,750 a year is not a lot of money to a firm billing for the work.