You should charge something for this. Even if you charged $10/year, it at least gives the impression that there is a contract and agreement in place that you will maintain the service and protect and provide the service. I have no interest, personally, in entering a bunch of invoice data in a service that might get shut down in a year after the developers lose interest in maintaining something that they lose money on.
Hi Brandon! Email is also free, Facebook is free, waze, twitter, etc... We will NOT be charging a monthly or annual fee for InvoiceNinja.com Email us to discuss: contact@invoiceninja.com
My wife and I loved the logo. Nice sense of whimsy.
I'm not in the market for a new invoicing app, but if I were, the perceived sustainability of your business model is a dealbreaker for using you for it. My business deals with a 6 year audit window. (Technically speaking, multiple overlapping 6 year audit windows.) If your business fails, and I get audited, bad stuff happens. (e.g. The National Tax Agency might come to the conclusion "Mr. McKenzie, you claimed you had $5,000 withheld by clients in 2010 on your tax return for that fiscal year, but you seem to be unable to support that with original documentation. That's unfortunate, but we believe you're acting without malice, so in lieu of imprisoning you we'll just ask you to pay the $5,000 plus statutory interest of 8% a year."
Does this adequately explain why Free-as-in-Beer invoicing software doesn't exactly light a fire in my belly?
Nothing is free. E-mail is either provided by your ISP (which you pay for) or ads are displayed alongside the e-mail messages. Facebook publishes ads. Twitter publishes ads.
Will you be publishing ads on invoices? What is your plan to have the service be sustainable into the future?
Facebook and Twitter have (m|b)illions of users and investment dollars behind them and thousands of employees. While I don't know a lot about your company, that in itself is a strong signal that you're not in the same boat.
I respect your desire to want to office the service for free, but I don't think your comparison will help to assuage anyone's fears of you disappearing.
So the service is ad sponsored like those services? And is mining data to target that advertising? I can't see any of that, but if you explicitly compare yourself to that sort of service without specifying otherwise it is an assumption many will make and won't be happy with.
Without some obvious sign of how the service intends to fund itself a lot of people will walk away assuming that it is advertising and/or mining (which they won't like for their invoices), that it will go away as soon as some unknown reserve runs out, or that it will suddenly become expensive once they are dependent on it. They won't believe "we never intend to charge" (they've heard that before and it hasn't always been true) and won't email you to ask (they just head off on their merry way).
If you don't explain a business model (selling add-ons, advertising, freemium)... People will assume the most nefarious business model possible. I know how Facebook and Gmail and Dropbox make money. I'd need to know how you make money before I start using your product.
Those other services have people engaging with them many times per day thus the traffic. Invoicing is a task that you would do maybe once or twice per week ?
Also the live PDF view, which clever, is really also annoying as any typing or mouse hovering makes that area flash.
"About us" should really be.... about you, not some strange mix of "features" and "technology".
Given the number short-lived web apps that appear and disappear, the about us page is becoming one of the most important. Any "about us" that doesn't mention people is an immediate close for me.
It doesn't matter if you're a one-man band, put up a picture and work out what details of your life so far will cause people to trust you.
Expect an "About the Invoice Ninja Team" page soon.
For now... here's a link to my blog http://hillelcoren.com/. I've been building apps for a while now and stand 100% behind anything I create. This project is team affair though.
I realize trust is earned and I hope we're given the chance to earn it.
Does your 'content' assist with (what I presume to be) missing words too?
For some more substance: I quite like your tool, but I wish the preview was more instant and not a pdf. Perhaps you could render your pdf previews to an image, and only provide the pdf when download is clicked?
Also, apologies if I missed it, but is there a way to customize the template, or will this eventually be possible?
I love how you've taken the friction out of the signup process and the preview is great. However I can't use it as because I have the following text on my invoices:
1) In Canada you must include your GST# (looks like "55555 5555 RT001")
2) My business address, consultant contact name/email
3) Payment instructions (doesn't quite fit under terms, i.e. Checks payable to, or Wire Transfer / SWIFT code)
4) Ability to add additional billing information (i.e. one of the big companies requires department, a service agreement # and company contact under the "Bill To:")
The demo is very fast, I just click a button and I'm in the middle of creating an invoice in a blink of an eye and it even produces the PDF right away. Good job.
I didn't find the pricing information anywhere on the site, however. Even after I clicked Sign Up there was no mention of how much it costs or if it's free, so I went back to the front page searching for that information and didn't find it there either.
EDIT: I noticed the box telling it's 100% free now that I had missed when I arrived at the site as I just quickly scanned it and then clicked the Invoice Now button. How are you planning to monetize it? Why should I believe it will always be free?
Um, did you miss the yellow block on the left side of the front page? It says...
100% FREE, ALWAYS
Invoicing with no monthly fee, because you have enough bills already! Free, now and
forever! Quality invoicing to build your business and get paid.
There are references to "Free" all over the front page.
Love the inline PDF preview, and overall it's quite clean.
But this is very US centric. But then again, one of my previous jobs existed only because the European subsidiary of my employer did not trust the 50 person strong US billing team to handle European invoicing in a legal way (so we built and operated our own billing system...) - billing/invoicing is tricky to internationalise right.
If you want to consider making it more generic:
Apart from allowing specifying replacement translated text for fields (for many countries this alone makes it impossible to legally use in its current form), a minimum would be changing decimal point/comma (many countries reverse use of comma and decimal point, for example) and grouping.
Also, this doesn't look like it can generate legal invoices for most European countries even disregarding currency, as most European countries have various text that is legally required for a document to be considered an invoice. For starters, the senders name, registered address and registration number (if a company) is required in most instances, and a VAT registration number (if VAT registered).
You can solve that most easily by adding fields for senders/issuers address details to put on the top of the invoice, and a free form text field as a footer, as this varies country by country.
If the invoice includes VAT on line items, there are also usually a legal requirement to sum up the VAT total for the invoice, which would be separate from any other taxes or duties, so you might also want to consider breaking out the different types of tax in your totals. (never mind that there are also rounding issues where specific ways to round are often legally required; in general you ought to be ok for most countries if you add together the unrounded line item tax values and then round, rather than summing up the rounded values - I haven't looked to see what you currently do).
German, Italian and French developers have offered to help translate the site and we're working on redoing how line item taxes are grouped. You can track these issues on GitHub:
There's definitely still work remaining but the more eyes we get looking at it the better we can make it. Please join our Facebook page and keep talking to us.
I'm actually curious at which difficulties you ran into when creating the app without authentication (have been thinking about this myself, just didn't create it yet)
"100% FREE, ALWAYS" What's the catch? How are they going to make money? Harvest invoice data? Really the only reason I use Freshbooks is for the 50-cent Paypal invoices but I first create an actual PDF invoice in OpenOffice.
Thanks for your comment! We will not "harvest invoice data", rather in the near future we'll be offering more advanced payment gateway options for those who want to move off PayPal.
I really like this, obviously a lot of attention to usability.
Minor niggle: the invoice redraws a lot when it doesn't have to, e.g. changing focus without actually modifying any fields. That's a bit flickery and distracting.
Many people have asked how this will be sustainable if it's free?
Enabling a ‘Pay Now’ button on an invoice requires configuring a payment provider. PayPal can be good when starting out but as you grow other providers may make more sense.
We will have affiliate links to these providers and will earn a small commission if people sign up.
The most expensive part of this sort of app is the development costs and I work for free. If we were hosting pictures or videos server costs could be an issue but invoice data is just text. I also have an amazing partner who is backing any financial concerns.
I instantly shunned it because it is advertised as hosted invoicing CMS. I know you can install it yourself, and this is where you should focus on too, like fusioninvoice, which I am very comfortable with at this time.
No serious person is ever going to use your 'free-cloud-powered' service. As for paid cloud powered invoicing cms, freshbooks is a good choice, because I know they are not going to disappear overnight. But they are damn expensive for a small company therefore I use self-hosted fusion invoice cms.
Looks great. Quick bug report - when working on an actual invoice I ran into issues on FireFox ESR 24. (I would imagine this happens any time a user restricts access to rendering PDFs on screen or in the browser as objects?) It pops up the "Open or Save" dialog each time a change is made and the object fails to load in the window below. Perhaps detecting the issue up front and then offering a "download" button when complete would be an alternative.
The columns don't really line up will in the invoice and website in iOS7 chrome. The description in the invoice bleeds in to the second row. Same with my account in the top navigation/menu bar.
Otherwise really cool - I will probably use this even though I'm a little less than thrilled over the name honestly.
Cool, reminds me of invoiceomatic.io, which has a 'robot' theme.
I look forward to invoicepirate.com (invoicing for piracy), invoicezombie.com (invoicing for reanimating dead projects), and invoicedinosaur.com (invoicing for ancient legacy projects that should be extinct).
Cool. Ever thought of verifying the addresses to make sure you're not missing apartment numbers and stuff? SmartyStreets would be happy to donate unlimited service to your startup for free for a year.
Great idea, small bug in switching currencies. When I change the theme of an invoice it defaults back to USD and does not revert back to the currency set in the preferences.
Try Invoice Machine (http://invoicemachine.com/). I don't know if they support Greek characters or not, but they are a small Swedish team so they are definitely internationalized.
