It’s practically my biggest hurdle when it comes to billing a client for my work. Nine out of ten times I end up late invoicing because I dread the hour I have to spend figuring out PayPal’s invoicing. For a company that makes $33 billion a year, you’d think they’d use their own product.
This time around when it came to sending an invoice to the client, I decided to spend a little bit of extra time and window shop at a few other places.
My first and final stop was Invoice Ninja, it caught my eye with their self-hosting support. In addition to supporting most of the features I cared about. That being:
- Recurring invoices,
- Stripe support,
- And a client portal. <- I didn’t find this gem till after I set it up and it makes life 10x easier for my clients, especially when tracking expenses across months.
Minus points for having an uncreative AI-generated landing page…
I found a docker image created by bon5co and used it in combination with Railway, once that was done I pointed a custom domain to it, and within 5 minutes I had a cheap, reliable (still to be proven with time) invoicing setup that costs me about $5 a month in hosting fees.
Next I wired up one of my @ezraharris.com emails which allowed me to send invoices with a clean email template in a click.
Stripe connection took only a few minutes for my pre-existing account and I was set to bill my first client.
So far it’s done exactly what I wanted: invoices go out on schedule, clients pay with a card, and I don’t have to think about it. Ask me again in six months whether that strikethrough on “reliable” comes off. If you’re a freelancer who dreads invoicing as much as I did, give Invoice Ninja a shot. It took me less time to set up than writing this post.
Leave a Reply