I built a free invoice generator as a solo dev. Here's a month of honest numbers — including the $0.
I keep seeing "transparent numbers" posts here and they're my favorite thing on IH, so here's mine — warts and all.
I built invoicegenapp.com, a free online invoice generator for freelancers and small businesses. Angular + Firebase, just me. It's been live a while, but I only got serious about promoting it in the last month, so here's what actually happened.
The numbers (last ~28 days):
~98 active users
~150 sessions
Revenue: $0 (free plan is 3 invoices; Pro is $9/mo — nobody's upgraded yet)
Where the traffic came from (the interesting part):
Indie Hackers was my single best source by quality — 80% engagement rate, ~1m20s average time on site. Higher quality than anything else, by a lot.
Directories like SaaSHub and Peerlist sent small but very engaged traffic (one SaaSHub visitor spent 6 minutes clicking around).
Direct traffic was the biggest by volume but lowest quality (lots of it is probably me, honestly).
SEO is slowly waking up — more on that below.
The SEO experiment:
I built profession-specific landing pages — "graphic design invoice template," "photography invoice template," etc. — targeting long-tail searches the big players ignore. A month in: all indexed, showing up for ~60 different search queries, but ranking page 3+ (positions 30–100). So lots of impressions, basically zero clicks yet. Which is exactly what you'd expect for new pages on a new domain — they have to climb before anyone clicks. Watching to see if positions improve.
What's working: the people who do show up actually use it. Real users are creating invoices, adding clients, managing them — one session spent 8+ minutes in the app. So it's not a product problem. It's a "not enough of the right people find it yet" problem.
What's not working: turning free users into paid ones. $0 so far. That's the wall I'm staring at.
So my honest question for this community: for those who took a free tool to its first paying customer — what actually flipped it? Was it a feature, a pricing change, reaching out to users directly, something else? I've got engaged free users and a $0 revenue line, and I'd love to hear how others bridged that gap.
