Show HN: I've build a stupidly simple invoicing for freelancers and contractors | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: I've build a stupidly simple invoicing for freelancers and contractors

onigiri.one

113 pointskimelnick72 comments

Hey HN.

Being a freelance myself for a while I've used dozen of well-known services to run my routines.

I've acknowledged that I don't need THAT many different tools & functions where I just getting lost.

So I created Onigiri, a stupidly simple & convenient invoicing which allows you to create, send & store your invoices easily

Nick

Why'd you wrap it in ads?

Wdym?

How does it compare to https://invoice-generator.com/ ? It’s free and it stores invoices in the browser. It’s so simple that I wonder how this solution is simpler.

Came here to say this. At the point I had to register for the OP, I was out.

Or Zoho.

Not sure if it is unique to me given my ultrawide screen resolution (3440x1440 21:9), but the little arrow covers the words you and also by default.

Link:https://i.imgur.com/bzmlzQn.png

Also, this is a SUPER edge case, since you don't control third party plugins. But I thought you should be aware what your page looks like with the Dark Reader plugin (it more or less inverts a pages colors. It's a tool to make all pages have a dark theme, figured it might be helpful. Mostly because it seems like a fairly popular plugin. link: https://i.imgur.com/YKIzVjl.png)

Thank you, that's quite interesting.

Never thought of such a wide resolutions & 3rd party plugins for dark mode

You definitely should include a dark mode.

Arrow is at the same spot on a 1920x1080 monitor. I can drag it away, but the default position is like in GP's screenshot.

This looks good. I use invoiceninja bet I don't love it.

The 14 day trial doesn't really make sense to me though. if you want a limited trial, just limit the number of invoices you can download or send, say to 5. But a freemium model would make more sense to me.

That trial is the blocker for me even trying it. What I would like to do is try it with just one client for a few months to see if i like it, then switch everything if I do.

That that I was thinking about was not quite sure. your feedback makes me think that it was a right idea

Nice, congrats on the launch.

One small thing. On IPad iOS the Pricing link at the top doesn’t do anything. I was expecting it to zoom me to the pricing part of the page at the bottom.

EDIT: Fixed now thanks

Thanks for noticing!

Just fixed this and on mobile version as well

I would suggest you put pricing on a separate page. Was about to leave and then only realised i had to scroll all the way down to find it.

Other than that looks nice, though i do feel like I should say that I'm not your target audience since I've already rolled my own invoicing system.

> I would suggest you put pricing on a separate page. Was about to leave and then only realised i had to scroll all the way down to find it.

This is a very common landing page design though for these types of SaaS apps, lots of them are long single pages with pricing near the bottom.

I did leave the site because I didn't see the pricing, and came back here only to post the reason.

Hey, thanks for noticing!

I've already added a Pricing link to the navigation and it works like an anchor.

This is really nice point, thanks!

Yes, but typically you'd put a Pricing anchor link in the menu that scrolls down to it (next to Tools/Blog, on this site.)

Awesome work, I ended up building a custom invoice builder as part of a larger custom SaaS for my wife & my local business, so this product resonates big time.

My random internet person's opinion: Instead of a 14-day trial, I think freemium is better where you can use it for up to X # of clients and if you want to go beyond some usage then you have to pay (e.g. Vercel, GitHub, etc. model).

For $9/mo, I would also expect React/Angular/Vue libraries to implement this into a larger project or other back office workflow - just my 2 cents!

Thanks for sharing, I love stuff like this.

For $9/mo you are really expecting a library to integrate this in your other applications? I think you forgot a few numbers on that value.

Nope didn't say to "integrate it for me".

Simply said I expect there to be an npm to use in case I don't want to use the hosted UI. Very common, almost everyone does it. I would even expect that of free-to-use SaaS.

Example: https://www.npmjs.com/package/easyinvoice

Not to mention it's pretty low effort to build to a dist and npm publish - it would be very worth it to get more people using the product. That's why it's so common.

Unless you are consulting local IP and corporate lawyers, than you are almost certainly making mistakes.

There are a few areas one really needs to watch:

1. Dependent contractor status: Unless contracts state otherwise, a business could be hit with a massive tax bill at year end for things like pension contributions for a disgruntled contractor.

2. Comprehensive copyright transfer agreements that prevent edge-cases like disgruntled family suing your firm for ownership after someone passes.

3. Implicit/Explicit ownership of IP generated at/outside a firm depends on contract signing location, and on the nature of external projects. In some places a company can sue workers for ownership of whatever they build outside company hours unless explicitly given an exemption in the contract.

4. You don't necessarily own something just because you paid somebody outside your jurisdictional context. This is a deep copyright/trademark/patent rabbit-hole, and the answer is always "it depends"...

I am not saying you are necessarily exposing people to potential liabilities, but one should at least have legal folks take a cursory glance at your business plan for the service locations.

Best of luck =)

Have been using this for a while. Yep, stupidly simple and super super useful! Thank you

Thank you! Thanks for your support and glad to see you onboard!

I built neetoInvoice. https://neeto.com/neetoinvoice. It's completely free because we want you in. We make money using other products.

“Get started. It’s free”

But it’s not. I don’t appreciate this kind of deceiving language. I’m just sharing this as a “free” feedback from somebody who has no need or interest in this product.

But it is. You can’t start for free? What’s wrong with that? Can you explain?

I've been using a spreadsheet for 15 years. One to mark the granular project work log and the other to aggregate everything up and export to PDF

there isnt any way i would submit anything to this company after reading their privacy policy. going to use my content in perpetuity? like what? my invoices, my clients? my name? every single thing that has to do with my freelance business AND my invoices is pretty personal. no thanks. ill self host invoice ninja. easy peasy.

You need more information on the "What makes Onigiri unique?" section because I don't see any features that aren't already in (or are better than) other invoicing solutions. Hone in on the pain point because saying you're indie is a nice-to-have, not a pressing desire for most I'd say.

Yeah. I would say I should simplify LP even more and make it more straightforward though

thanks! I'm curious about the feature set as well

everything I found for my contracting was way too expensive for what it did. hope someone can tackle payroll next!

doesn't seem like competition is really working out here, but not for any real reason except some fragmentation amongst how contractors need to make invoices

Please let me know how it's going and how do you feel about Onigiri

> way too expensive for what it did

business likes comparison to viable alternatives (e.g. doing it yourself)

Fellow freelancer here. Sorry, but can't understand the business model. Cross-border money transfer fees are sometimes upwards $10. How are you able to finance that with $9/month?

Or do you not handle invoicing/money transfer ala remotify.co?

Does it do time tracking?

I'm currently a freelancer using Harvest to track time by project and task with a Chrome plug-in, and it generates an invoice every month. Works really well, even on their free plan. Wondering if Onigiri offers any benefits?

I've got time tracking in plans but not yet.

Still trying to figure out what would be better chrome plugin on mini native app. Why do you choose plugin from harvest now?

Well, in my case, I'm always in Chrome anyway, so having it as a browser popup is super convenient for being able to start/pause the timer in 2 clicks.

If it was an app, I'd probably never use it because it would take too much time to unlock my phone, find the app, wait for the app to launch, go to the timer, and then hit pause. It's a lot of friction for something I'll typically do 3-4 times a day, starting and stopping the timer to work on other things or just to take a break.

And if we would speak about desktop app - how does that fill? Some app that living in your tray area?

Just for time tracking? That seems overkill to me, in terms of having to manage the app downloads, installs, and updates across multiple machines. And I'd worry about security concerns. The Chrome extension is tied to your user profile and auto-synced across browser instances when you log in, and is just a tiny bit of JS that's sandboxed and subject to Chrome's robust permission model. I'd choose that over a desktop app any day for something as simple as a time tracker. This is the one I use, and I think it's not even an official Harvest app but a third-party thing that hooks into their API: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/harvest-time-tracke... (edit: My bad, it DOES seem like an official app)

On the other hand, if you were thinking of building the full web app into a native experience, then yeah, a desktop app would be better than an extension. But I still probably wouldn't use it over the regular website, especially if it were just an Electron/Webview wrapper anyway. In my experience the desktop apps/PWAs tend to be clunky and limit the UI in some significant way (such as not being able to easily right-click, or see the URL bar, or use uBlock, or easily silence notifications or prevent on-launch updates, etc).

My work currently uses Basecamp and I tried their desktop app once or twice, but it was so bad I went back to the website.

got it! Thank your for the details. Will consider chrome extensions for sure. May I somehow connect you later when I'll start playing around with it? Wanna hear feedback from an experienced harvest extension user

Sure, just emailed you.

PS at the website, under the "I've got more questions" accordion, the "Drop a line at email..." text isn't selectable or clickable.

Thanks! Let's keep in touch!

How much easier is this than a folder to store documents and google docs/word/apple pages for writing them?

Writing an invoice, and giving it a number and save to pdf was not something I found difficult and needed online tools.

I used to create my invoices with Excel. What does this provide that I could not do with Excel? I think the big value add would be tying it with accounting software but this has no such component?

Yep, I plan to add an integration to connect it with Xero, Quickbooks & some others

I love the landing page! Did you design it yourself?

Yep, made it myself on Framer

I was scrolling on mobile and happen to grab the star and chuck it, feature or a bug? lol I liked it.

Stupidly simple invoicing should be easier than this. probably invoice dragon is closest to that. What you should focus on as an additional layer to stupid is database and recordkeeping. "save an invoice" -> 'list of saved invoices" -> "database of invoice, order, product, customer, [etc]".

And use logins for storing this data online, with customer info, and product info. Offer fancy templates under paywall. Offer (monthly) reports under paywall. Offer data retention under paywall.

Almost there :)

THanks for an advice. Regarding the templates, reports & data retention that's fair.

Didn't get the point before, cause I've got the list and ability to keep everything. Not clear for me

Ok. Didn’t know that all invoices are saved.

Small copy edit, in your questions section:

What is Onigiri and how DOES it WORK?

"How it works" is not a question in English.

Thanks, fixed this

Nearly! Typo in the fix: How "doest" this work?

Omg) now definitely "does") ty