I’ve been a user of the Harvest online invoicing service for about a year now after a brief (and expensive for my cheap tastes) stint with Freshbooks. Before I go further, I should explain that I don’t need much in the way of online billing. Here’s where I’m coming from:
- Users: 1
- Clients: 6-10
- Monthly invoices sent: 2-4
- Monthly estimates sent: ~1
- Recurring billing is a must
Unfortunately, the # of clients puts me in the $19.95 category for Freshbooks, which is silly for sending no more than 4 invoices a month. Harvest makes things a little more palatable – $12. Still, should I be paying $12 a month to send 2-4 invoices and maybe an estimate? I’m also frustrated with the inability to handle partial payments and/or overpayments (credits) with Harvest, so it’s time to look at some alternatives.
Blinksale
The big 3 invoicing services that seem to be compared to each other over and over again are Freshbooks, Harvest, and Blinksale. Blinksale has a $6 plan that is easy to swallow as long as I stay under 6 invoices a month. The problem with Blinksale is that you need to upgrade to the $24 plan in order to send PDF versions of your invoices. Every other service I’ve tried includes that with every plan.
Blinksale has also received some scathing feedback from long-time users via their support page due to a percieved lack of responsiveness to users and a lack of updates. I get the impression that has turned around lately though.
InvoiceBubble
InvoiceBubble is free (with ads) or $5 (without ads). It does everything I want a simple invoicing service to do, except one thing that bugs the shit out of me: When creating an invoice, you add your units (hours, etc) in one box and the rate in another. Most services will multiply the units by the rate and provide a total for you. InvoiceBubble makes you do this yourself.
A couple of other minor annoyances – it doesn’t support Thank You messages after accepting a payment and when creating estimates, there is no field for units until you try to convert the estimate into an invoice.
Here are some other services I tried briefly along with the primary reason I decided against them:
- Curdbee: $5/month for PDF support which is fine, but another $5 to create and send estimates
- The Invoice Machine – $12 for cheapest plan I would need.
- Cannybill – Too complex for my needs.
For now, I’ve chosen Blinksale in spite of it’s shortcomings with PDFs. They’ve indicated via a twitter conversation that they are working on partial payments/credits, so I’ll wait and see if that happens. InvoiceBubble is not a bad options by any means, but Blinksale just feels a little more refined at the moment.