Simple Invoice Generator

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.

Hey IH,

I want to share what I've been building — invoicegenapp.com — a simple invoice generator for freelancers and small businesses.

The problem

I do occasional freelance work and every time I needed to invoice a client I hit the same wall. Every tool wanted me to connect my bank account, set up a full accounting system, or pay $15-20/month for features I'd never use.

I just wanted to send a clean PDF invoice. So I built it myself.

What I built

A web-based invoice generator focused on simplicity:

- Create a professional invoice in under 2 minutes

- Export to PDF or send directly by email

- Client management with auto-fill

- Invoice status tracking (draft, unpaid, paid, overdue — auto-detects overdue)

- Revenue dashboard with monthly chart

- 8 currencies

- Custom invoice numbering and prefix

- Logo and branding support

Free plan: up to 3 invoices, no credit card required

Pro: $9/month or $79/year for unlimited invoices

The stack

Angular 17, Firebase (Auth + Firestore + Functions), PayPal for subscriptions, SendGrid for email delivery. Hosted on Firebase Hosting at invoicegenapp.com.

Current status

- Live at invoicegenapp.com

- First real users signing up

- Listed on G2, Capterra, SaaSHub

- 41 new users in the first week

- Planning Product Hunt launch next week

What I learned

1. Scope creep is real — I kept adding "just one more feature". Ship first, improve later.

2. Firebase is incredible for solo founders — auth, database, hosting, functions all in one place.

3. The hardest part isn't building — it's getting people to find you.

4. Every small win matters — seeing that first stranger sign up felt amazing.

What I'm looking for

Honest feedback from the IH community:

- Does the pricing make sense?

- What features would make you actually switch from your current tool?

- Would you use this? Why / why not?

Happy to answer any questions about the tech stack or the journey. Thanks for reading!