Show HN: InvoicingAPI is finally ready | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: InvoicingAPI is finally ready

invoicingapi.com

20 pointsyourboyreno23 comments

After a lot of personal hardships over the past year, I can finally say that InvoicingAPI is ready for public use.

It's a platform where you can create beautiful, customizable and dynamic, tax-compliant invoices with payment links built in, so your clients pay you faster. In your dashboard you can see your payments and payouts to your bank.

This is just an initial release and plenty of features are in the pipeline, like an online builder, automated sending, 3rd party app integration, etc.

Feel free to poke around and let me know your thoughts!

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Congrats on the launch! This looks like it could be very useful.

I'd suggest changing your post title, though. When I use something that has sensitive financial data and a payment feature, I want to feel very confident. The title makes it seem like the company (or product) has had lots of ups and downs, which makes me nervous to use it until I find out that it's actually a reference to personal issues.

Maybe something like this would be better? "Show HN: Spent a year building a better invoicing API"

Looks like the server is getting hugged to death. Not good either.

Seems to be ok on my side but indeed the analytics show far more traffic than what I expected.

Well, the homepage is up and it’s effing beautiful bro. Good on you. Man looks great.

Thanks so much. I appreciate it!

Host your static site and assets on a dedicated static host, like Netlify, or put a CDN like Cloudflare in front of it as a cache. It's not particularly expensive. There's no reason to wonder if your static site is overloaded these days.

Agree, my first thought was “an invoicing platform that has had problems sounds like something I want to avoid…”

And even though it’s about the rough year you’ve had from a personal perspective it highlights the fact that you are a sole developer and that your personal ups and downs got in the way of the product - which makes me cautious about long term viability.

Yeah in hindsight that wasn't a good title I guess I wanted to give the post a more personable feel.

Indeed I'm a solo dev on this project but it's here to stay.

Thanks for checking it out!

Hey, that's a very fair point. I was referencing my personal situation and not the project. I've gone ahead and updated the post. The project is definitely here to stay. Even through the toughest times in my life I managed to release so it's only up from here.

I am a bit confused why I would pay 15 EUR a month for a invoicing API when I can pay less and get an entire invoicing platform that has a GUI to easily make invoices? There does not appear to be a reason for that listed.

There is nothing wrong with the product or idea, but I don't see a reason as to why. Even Stripe offers easy invoice creation.

Yeah. If you’re entering a market with a very strong incumbent, a core of your marketing strategy likely needs to be clarity on why to pick you over them.

Hey thanks for having a look. Indeed one gap in my platform is the lack of GUI for creating an invoice. Atm it's just through the API but I should have mentioned that the online builder is in the works. So it won't be bound to developers only.

Overall I'm still iterating on the platform, it's current state is not the final one so there are more features coming.

This still puts most of the load on the customer in terms of building out dunning schedules, handling renewals, etc.

And "beauty" in invoices is not a value proposition. An invoice sitting in someone's inbox is ugly, no matter how pretty it is.

Invoicing software is an exercise in corner cases. Having the renewal date differ from the initial invoice date; sending out invoices 45 days before they're due, except when (...), on days that end in (...), when the moon is a waxing gibbous, etc

Delivering this as an api "solves" it by allowing for unlimited customization, but the customer for this would want it to be checkboxes, not code.

I guess I just don’t quite get it. Every small and large business accounting suite (some costing less than this!) offers invoicing that meets incredible amounts of use cases.

Doesn’t seem like something I’d use or recommend.

Hey thanks for the feedback. Yeah I'm still iterating on pricing, it's quite hard to get it right I'll be honest. I'll mention that a lot of the competition is taking a percentage of the total from invoices paid through their platform, on top of their monthly subscription, mine doesn't. The monthly charge is final.

Congrats on the launch!

What happens if I reach the invoice limit? Does it just stop sending out emails, meaning I lose out my sales that fail to send their invoice?

Thanks! Indeed when the limit is reached it doesn't generate further. That's not an issue with the premium plan though. I'm open to feedback on the plans and their limits though.

This looks really cool man, congrats on the launch! Would you mind sharing the tech stack you've used for this?

Hey thanks! Yes sure, it's built primarily with .NET for front and backend.

I like the idea but I have doubts about the price

What's the current competition?

FreshBooks has a similar API but different pricing and far more features. Payments integrated too.

Probably this https://invoice-generator.com/developers. More on it here https://github.com/Invoice-Generator/invoice-generator-api.

This appears to be a free service, but the code behind the API is not available.

Although, the one benefit for InvoicingAPI is that it gives an option to quickly give a payment code instead of having to send them to another payment application.

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