I just can't find a good application that will manage my web development agency!

Hi, I am Shakhawat. I do run a small web design studio called Batin Studio. from the past couple of weeks, I have been searching for a good software that will help me manage everything for my agency, from project management to invoicing.

I did find some solution, among them Hello Bonsai suits me perfectly but boy..... it's expensive 🥹. Yes, I understand that convenience comes at a price but as a small business, it's not possible for me to afford that subscription cost.

So, I have been looking for alternative options. I looked for software stacks instead of a single application but I found it very inconvenient and expensive + I have to manage multiple applications cost, though they do not integrate very efficiently with each other.

Even tried self-hosted ones. Oracle Cloud is generous enough to give a 4-core CPU with 24GB of RAM for free to everyone, so I thought to use that one and installed plane.so, judging by its feature set. But their self-hosted community edition doesn't include time tracking and have to take subscription or pay a one-time fee $700+ something. I am not saying it's a bad deal but it does miss many features which I need, like automated invoicing based on time tracked, a client dashboard, or sending contracts/offers. Though it's very good for project management, if anyone doesn't need the time tracking feature.

Currently, I am using,
Plane - for Project management
Jibble - for time tracking
Mercurry - for payments/invoicing
Hostinger - SMTP/emails

it's somehow managing my client projects but it's being difficult for me to manage and communicate between my team and the client. I don't know if I am missing any platform which can hold the hand of someone who is just starting out and has 1-2 clients and don't have $300/month to spend on just SAAS applications.

In this case I can just scale my business and get 2-4 more clients and get the ability to just afford a solution like Hello Bonsai. But am I too wrong for being so egotistic to think that there should be something, and if none, I should build one? Because this is a valid market gap and if I do good enough job, people who will start with this tool might not switch because they are just too used to it and they have all the essential features they need to manage their business.

But if I do that, I want to make it open source and maybe do something like what n8n has been doing. Everything is free except the hosted version and some enterprise-grade shit like SSO etc.

Thanks for reading all these. Please let me know your thoughts so that I can make a decision based on that.