Corduroy: A billing system for your startup (launched today) | Hacker News Reader

Corduroy: A billing system for your startup (launched today)

corduroysite.com

28 pointsthere29 comments

Very nicely done. It'll be interesting to see how this stacks up against Blinksale. The price is reasonable when compared with Blinksale and the like, but you'll probably want to make this $59/mo unlimited or a high number of invoices, and create sub-plans that, for example, with $10 a month, you can send out x invoices.

Just some thoughts.

By the way, I've always wondered this. How do you reroute subdomain.corduroysite.com? DNS things? In other words - how do you recognize that subdomain.corduroysite.com is the account name? I haven't been able to figure this out, but it's probably because I've been on shared hosting forever :)

thanks. judging from the comments here already, i think a lower-priced restricted plan is needed. i'll work on that tonight...

for subdomains, a simple DNS wildcard is used to route (everything).corduroysite.com to the same ip. a wildcard SSL certificate is also needed, which is quite expensive unfortunately.

the application then checks the hostname that was passed from the web server, finds the matching company record, and does its magic.

Wild card DNS entry directs all subdomian.site.com addresses to the same server, then determine the site based on the URL in code. That's how I do it.

e.g. http://dev.rubyonrails.org/svn/rails/plugins/account_locatio...

There is a need for this. I was looking at some other solutions and gave up and went with Zoho Invoice when it launched about a month ago. Using Excel has worked over the years but I needed something that was a bit more reliable at keeping all the info neat and tidy. The main factor for me was price, I would probably not have signed up but the 5 buck a month fee was something that I could take without feeling guilty or lazy. Anything over 20 bucks a month and I would of kept doing things the same way as i only have about 8-12 re-occurring invoices every month.

Good Luck!

Cool, I'm willing to take a look. I'm a very happy Freshbooks (http://www.freshbooks.com) customer now though, is this better?

Another billing/invoice2.0 site? You picked a crowded market.

http://mashable.com/2007/08/09/online-business/

What is your competitive advantage? And from a customer perspective, what's unique about your app?

i guess i should start by saying i didn't pick the market. i started writing this application years ago to run my own software development business because i was unhappy with quickbooks, and i've been using corduroy as my sole billing system ever since. i just recently added a few features and launched it as a hosted service because of some outside interest in it.

looking over that list of accounting packages, nearly all of them are just invoicing and/or project management applications. corduroy adds check writing, online banking integration and transaction history, as well as customer login support.

The customer login support is a big deal for me. I've been trying to get away from paper billing for a while, because it's slow and expensive and I'd rather just send an email with a link. I've been doing that the hard way lately and had been thinking about building something like your system. I'm glad you did it instead.

At $59, it's on the far side of what I'd want to pay for such a system. However, I would pay it.

One thing I'd like to see is a way to build custom invoices. I have a very specific, and fairly unique, invoice design, and would like to hang on to that. Switching to a generic invoice layout might be a dealbreaker. I know that's a lot of work though -- sorry for adding on to the "please do this!" pile.

i will be supporting the custom invoice design as a one-time fee for turning your existing invoice design into code. i may also design some other basic templates that can be used instead of the default.

my company's invoices that are generated through corduroy have a neat faded background image and logo.

don't cop out by saying you didn't pick the market. when you release a targetted service and charge for it, you're picking a market. embrace it though. your market may not be quickbooks users. so say, "We're building a better online accounting service for small companies that don't need to overhead and learning curve of Quickbooks and need more than just invoicing." that middle ground is your market.

If your are targeting discontent Quickbooks users, then it will be very difficult battle. The cost of switching is very high, and most of the quickbooks users are not web savvy, they will cling to what they are used unless Intuit really screws them up. I don't think it's likely to happen because Intuit is a very strong company - Microsoft tried very hard to get them but failed.

I do think you might have a chance to target the web startups, like the users of YC news. But these companies are cheap, so you may need to give me at least 1-year free trial so that I can see your app carry me through a tax year. Then I wouldn't mind $59 a month. But then, most web startups die in a few years. Well, it's just tough.

Don't forget Quickbooks - it is by far the most dominant player.

For most small biz owners, being online is not important, so a locally installed QuickBooks is good enough. Even if web access is required, Intuit can put Quickbooks online easily just like they put TurboTax online.

A little pricy- push the cost down a tad and a lot more independent contractors would use it. Some I know already use the open source http://www.bambooinvoice.com ok their own servers.

$59 a year would be reasonable.

That's hardly the case. Anything less than around $800 per year, which is what the average CPA charges to do a small corporation's 1120 or 1120S tax return, is reasonable. That equates to $66.67 per month. When you start to consider how much time and hassle a good accounting package can save, the price could even be higher while still providing value.

Accounting usually gets ignored in startup environments, but it's really crucial to have a grip on things. Otherwise, who knows...you might end up like Bear Stearns. Or Enron.

This won't do your tax returns.

update: in response to many suggestions, there are now 2 additional packages that are cheaper but limit certain features.

http://corduroysite.com/pricing/

sql ledger is free. how does this stack up? I'd rather the product be open source so I could install on my own systems and keep my records. Just a security thing... financial data is important.

sql ledger is kind of gross.

Interesting but - $59.00 per month for the service?

a 1500-invoice package from blinksale (which only does invoicing) costs $49/month. harvest's business plan costs $90/month and is also geared towards projects and invoices only.

I think its more the fact that you don't have different level packages.. perhaps add a lower one with more limits?

Independent contractor version that is much cheaper could be useful, and would be necessary to compete with a spreadsheet.

In the past I have used spreadsheets that I export to pdf and send to the clients that look almost exactly like this format, and manually managed them.

I think simpler is better. A single price makes it easier to decide whether to use the system at all. Of course, it shouldn't be too high, but I don't think $59 is too high.

Simpler is better, but not for pricing. Look into variable pricing theory and price discrimination, it offers higher potential profits. If you do stick to fixed pricing, make sure you do at least a minimal amount of research to determine the optimal price. YOU don't think 59$ is too high, but whats the optimal price for profitability?

Why is it, then, that services seem to trend towards all-you-can-use at a flat rate? Even when there are lower levels of service (in whatever), they're usually ridiculously less service for a bit less price, which seems to just be a way to drive people to the One True Price that the provider really wants.

My company is charging $50 per month for 5-user licenses for Exponent. You can see what it offers at: http://www.thinkcomputer.com/software/exponent

Looks really good.

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