• 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.

I have a number of hardwired devices in my home network (PS3, 2 DirecTV HD boxes, a WinXP homebrew “media server”, and my Macbook Pro most of the time). I had purchased a couple of Netgear gigabit switches in anticipation of going full 1000Mbps at some point. I was also using an old G4 400Mhz Gigabit Mac tower solely as a print and file server. The Airport Extreme would allow me to complete the 1000Mbps network, handle the print and file server duties, and add wireless N for the Macbook Pro as a bonus.

After some stupid moves on my part that delayed getting the network up and running with the Airport Extreme, I got my Actiontec GT701 DSL modem/router configured for PPPOE and set up the Airport to log in to my DSL provider, allocate DHCP addresses, and create a wireless network. The problem is that EVERYTIME you click “update” to make a configuration change – even as minor as changing the status light from always on to “flash on activity” requires a reboot that takes FOREVER. With my old Linksys router, it had to be something major to require a reboot.

The other thing that really bugs me is that everytime you load the Airport Utility, it starts out wanting to run a setup wizard. You have to choose “manual setup” first before proceeding.

That’s not the end of it. The first time I attached a USB hard drive to the Airport, I could see and browse without any problems. However, after several update/reboots, neither that drive or another I tried would show up anywhere other than in the Airport Utility. I was ready to throw in the towel before deciding to reformat one of the drives as Apple OS Extended to see if that made a difference and it did. I then reformatted my Time Machine drive and attached it as well and it worked to. It took all night to do the initial backup (I should have done that before attaching to the Airport), but it’s working.

So in spite of the initial issues I’ve had, I’ve achieved everything I wanted and then some with the Airport Extreme. I would even consider attaching the external drive I use for iPhoto and iTunes to the Airport except that I don’t think Time Machine would back it up if I did.