LoveInvoice

So, this all started when I saw that Google was attempting to replace traditional search results with an AI overview. I'm not entirely discouraged by tools having AI features, it's pretty much the norm these days.

I decided to ask it questions about LoveInvoice, just out of curiosity. There's something interesting in seeing a chatbot talk about your products, and I wanted to know what it knew. I ended up talking about pricing, and realised something very interesting - my app discourages scaling. It started spewing out comparisons between the 1% fee versus subscription-based alternatives and it was clear that there was a problem.

LoveInvoice is completely free to use, but an application fee of 1% is taken whenever a Stripe payment is taken through the app. You can completely use all of its features without this fee if you don't want to connect online payments, but when I was researching initially, that 1% for me felt negligible.

In the grand scheme of things, Stripe is already taking a small fee as a percentage (mostly), I assumed that the user would see that fee as an extension of that - an extra little bit to handle the actual sending, etc.

But when that 1% scales, it becomes very disproportionate - a £5,000 invoice ends up with LoveInvoice taking £20 of that (there is a maximum fee cap). That's a single big invoice, and most SaaS applications' monthly fees for unlimited invoices are around that. Spread that over several invoices and you end up paying considerably more than you ever would if the app was subscription-based.

The whole idea of this pricing model initially was to appeal to freelancers who don't want to pay out of pocket. I get paid if you get paid. I spent so long focusing on that specific kind of user that I didn't think about the other end of the spectrum.

I spent a lot of time working it out, and decided that the maximum fee cap would need to be lowered... significantly. Eventually I settled on £3/$4/€3.50 and removed the minimum fee (£0.50). Now, big users aren't penalised.

I know it's early doors thinking about this - I don't have any big users yet, but I think it makes sense to solve these problems before they put people off signing up altogether. I think from a user's POV, even though I know I'm not likely to hit those limits, it does make you slightly cautious because of the "what if".

So now LoveInvoice is cheaper to use, and still free for everything else. Thanks, Google.

Hey IH!

This project started more from frustration than anything else.

When I was freelancing, money was tight. I didn't want to pay for invoicing software when I wasn't even consistently earning yet. Free tiers were limited, and trials feel like a trap... You sign up thinking it's 'free', then immediately are cautious to get used to using it as you don't know what's going to get locked away in 14 days.

I've used a lot of invoicing apps in my time (I used to review them for one of Envato's old app review blogs). The bigger players felt clunky and over-engineered. The smaller ones felt like they just wanted you on a paid plan as quickly as possible.

So I ended up building my own version with one simple idea: what if invoicing was pleasant?

What it is

LoveInvoice is a hosted invoicing app built for freelancers who just want to send invoices and get paid, without all the noise.

It's intentionally simple and opinionated around ease of use, not accounting complexity, but you can still customise and brand the hell out of it. Emails, invoice templates, all editable.

Stack-wise, it's built with Hono + TypeScript on the backend and React (Vite) on the frontend, with Drizzle for the ORM. I came from a PHP background, so this was also my first real dive into TypeScript - there was a fair bit of wrestling with tooling early on, but I've ended up really liking the stack and it's my go-to on other projects I've started since (which I hope to announce here shortly).

Pricing

This was the hardest part to figure out.

At one point I had a flat $5/month plan in mind (accessible, reasonable). Then I considered going free. Eventually I landed on something I think is more aligned with what I wanted to build:

LoveInvoice is free to use.

No paid tiers. No feature gating. No trials.

Instead, there's a 1% application fee on online payments via Stripe (min $0.50, capped at around ~$20 depending on currency).

So:

• If you never get paid through it, it costs nothing

• If you do get paid through it, I take a small cut of that transaction

If you just want to manually track payments or add bank details, you can do that too - no pressure to integrate Stripe at all, it's completely optional.

Where I'm at

It's currently open to sign-ups as a 'closed beta' while I iron out bugs and improve core flows.

I could probably polish it forever, but I'd rather get it into people's hands and iterate based on real usage instead of tweaking it in isolation.

There's also a community forum built in so users can suggest features, share workflows, and help shape where it goes next.

Website: https://loveinvoice.com

What I'd love feedback on

Mainly:

• Does this idea actually resonate?

• What do you hate most about invoicing tools today?

• Would 'simpler + no upfront cost' actually make you switch, or is that not enough?

Also open to any advice on marketing this. This is my first solo project where I've genuinely thought 'I want to take this seriously', so I'm figuring a lot of it out as I go.