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.
Tags: blinksale, harvest, invoicebubble, online billing
My scenario was very similar to yours. I normally have to send 10-20 invoices for a month, along with occasional estimates. I checked Ballpark, Facebook, Blinksale and CurdBee.
Freshbooks solo package would cost me $20 (way too much!) for this and Blinksale’s Silver package allows me to send 50 invoices for the cost of $12. With Ballpark I can send exactly 10 invoices for $6, but if I have to send additional I would have to pay $24 per month (even expensive than Freshbooks). Then I tried CurdBee with Pro version, which allowed me to send any number of invoices for just $5 per month. That sounded awesome!
As you pointed out, problem with CurdBee was they charge separate $5 for using Estimates and Recurring Billing. But I found that we can enable the modules only when we need them. I normally do not have to send estimates every month. So I ended up only enabling Recurring Billing module and decided to enable estimates only when I need.
So now I only got to pay $10 per month for CurdBee and occasionally $15 for month, when I need to send estimates. I guess this plan is the most cost effective.
Great analysis and a timely one coz I’ve been considering an online invoicing service which can accept payments online over my quickbooks setup for awhile.
I have used Freshbooks and Blinksale before settling with quickbooks. Fresbooks was fairly expensive for me as they charged close to $20/month, so I went on to try Blinksale for awhile which was quite decent. However Blinksale keep moving from hand to hand for few times now and they don’t have the real passionate team those who created it initially. Their support is terrible and the new owners don’t know the answers to most of the questions, which is really sad.
I am curious to try the other apps you have mentioned and really haven’t comes across them before. Harvest and Curdbee looks promising for me, will keep you posted if I settle with one of them
@Jim: I will say that my twitter questions to blinksale have been responded to quickly, so I think they’ve gotten the hint that they now have a bad reputation in terms of support that must be dealt with.
I’m trying to figure out the best one for myself. I have signed up for freshbooks, harvest, and blinksale.
Blinksale is nice and just does invoicing. Harvest has projects and timesheet which is nice.