After researching other billing applications, like FreshBooks, we think Invoicing should be free. We are excited to launch additional features pending Hacker News feedback :]
View the app at http://www.healpay.com
For identification purposes, I've found that many people (in the US at least) know of Ann Arbor. It's the home of the University of Michigan. It's not a small town. It's got an activist base not dissimilar to San Francisco. And it's got a reputation (perhaps skewed by my own local sense) of being a place with a lot of bright, interesting young minds and otherwise successful and wealthy folks.
Detroit, on the other hand, is generally written about as though it's a city in a war torn third-world country.
Before I ask my question, I really don't this comment to be taken rudely (and I'm having a tough time phrasing it in a way that doesn't sound like I'm pointing a finger: "You're not really in THE D!!!") That's not my intention, please give me the benefit of the doubt on that.
Are the founders actually from Detroit or the Metro area and the company and their current location just happens to be located in Ann Arbor, or was it a marketing decision? If it was marketing, it worked for me. I believe you would get more clicks here, more traffic to your site, and ultimately more feedback by using Detroit over Ann Arbor in the name.
I'm not judging your motivations negatively either way, I'm just curious. I do not live in Detroit, but grew up in the metro area and have a very personal relationship with the good and the bad parts of the city. Most of us from the place I grew up, when asked, respond with "I'm grew up in Detroit". It's a small talk "out". It avoids the whole "where exactly is that" in the conversation (which, when you're from The Mitten State, requires pulling out your right hand to point at where you actually live). The "I grew up in Detroit" has changed the last 5-10 years to include the important a suburb (or even a distant suburb) of Detroit because it's no longer an "out" to say I'm from Detroit. The questions that follow can fill 30 minutes.
Which do you think is better to claim we're from?
Invoicing is an interesting domain because your users are receiving money as a result of your service-- thus charging a fee only means slightly less money coming in (so cognitively it's treated as a smaller gain than an actual loss).
My suggestion would be to offer a free account that gives a taste of your service but leaves your users wanting more. FreshBooks is a good example-- you can only have three clients before you need to pay. Other options might be only paying if an invoice is above a certain amount.
Finally, a huge reason I use FreshBooks over email or my previous company's proprietary system is because I can give my clients a clean, professional interface where they can log in, view their invoice, and pay it online. So integration with Authorize.net, Google Checkout, (and I suppose PayPal, though I dislike them) are key. One thing you can do right away that is a step above FreshBooks is to allow authenticating against an external url using a REST API. This would allow me to give my clients ONE password to use on their sites as well as for billing.
Hope that helps.
Also we plan on charging. Stay tuned. :)
People get what they pay for, I would be worried you are not in business to make money...
Must be another strategy behind this.
HealPay is designed to help businesses collect money. Invoicing is just one means to an end. The transaction/conversion is where we see real opportunity/innovation.
People who will pay you are typically very different than those who will use your product for free.
Feedback from people who won't pay is feedback you want to weed out.
Sounds like your mind is made up.
If the revenue is coming from transaction fees, present that as a feature. I could really see a transparent transaction-based model with free accounts working.
When you say "invoicing should be free", that sounds like a nice revolutionary pitch, but I wonder if BallinBige could clarify what features would be paid?