We just launched a new invoicing web app for under 10K. Check it out: Ballpark

Interesting choices in the pricing plans. I'm not sure I like using SSL as a differentiator -- I know it is quite common these days for many web apps, but particularly with invoicing you're putting third party (client of client) financial information out on an open wire because somebody was too cheap to pick the $50 a month plan.

"The small company I work with, Metalab, has just launched a new estimating and invoicing web app for under 10k with no VC. It's called Ballpark, check it out."

Thanks for the comments on the design, all of the credit for that goes to the main Metalab guy, Andrew Wilkinson, see more here http://www.metalabdesign.com

While the design is great and you have all the reason to be proud of it, the long term success of your business will tie mostly, if not all, to the functionality rather than design.

Quoted from cominatchu: "The 'under 10k' price tag is misleading because it does not include the opportunity cost of the web designers time. In other words, one has to calculate (the hours spent by Metalab web designers * their normal hourly rate) and add this to 10k to arrive at a more accurate cost for building this site."

Yes, we really did build it for less than $10k. Our key expenses were: Rails development (1 developer a few hours a week), a SliceHost server, and some custom icons we hired out. We're planning to break it down in more detail on our blog in the next little while, but I'd like to debunk this a bit here. You're absolutely right about the cost being higher if you consider what it would normally cost at a full consulting rate, but I feel like that's kind of fallacious logic:

If you learnt how to woodwork, built a bookshelf, then told your friends that it cost you $15 (the price of the wood and a couple of screws), they aren't going to argue that the true cost was $500 (the hours spent learning woodworking or a carpenter's rate).

If a founder who was an incredible programmer paid himself $1,000/month during the early months of his startup, would you say that his time really cost the company $15,000 (what he would have charged at a consulting rate)?

The point isn't that someone with no technical skills can do this for 10k (after all, this is Hacker News, and I assume most of you are highly skilled in the field), we're just pointing out that we managed to create a business by pulling a few extra hours a week over 6 months. We didn't have to quit our day jobs, move to the valley, or build a board of advisors - we just went ahead and built it. This isn't to say that it's an especially complex app or that it is some sort of technical feat, just that a little bit of money went a long way.

I don't think taking funding is always bad or anything, especially small seed funding like YC. Sometimes advantageous ideas need money to make them happen. The point is that most of you already have many of the skills required to build things, so funding really shouldn't be a barrier to entry. If your idea requires more money than you have, boil it down to the bare minimum and build it within your budget. We could easily have decided that we wanted to build the best invoicing app ever, figured out that invoicing was a 1.3 kagillion dollar industry, secured some funding, built up the stakes, then gone crazy with features. We could have convinced ourselves that we needed to close down our consulting business, hire a full-time Rails developer, and move in together. Instead we took a simple idea that we felt wasn't being done right, boiled it down to its core, then built it when we had the time.

I have tried Blinksale and FreshBooks (who I guess are your two most obvious competitors) and neither of those really worked out for me, so I am anxious to give Ballpark beyond clicking around a bit. I am constantly looking for something that is only as powerful as I need and fits nicely into my work flow.

My favorite feature is definitely the "news feed" that shows comments / payments / etc. - that is a great way to visualize what has gone on with the project.

And yes, great design :)

Would recommend using the word "unlimited" instead.

Pretty nitpicky, though-- outstanding work and is serving a need that all businesses have. I'm more bullish on this startup than 99% of the startups that are introduced here.

One thing I'd love to see: Implement autosave of invoice drafts, or at least a JavaScript popup whenever I try to navigate away from an unsaved form.

One nit-picky detail, at 2:57, the VO says the Dashboard will "show how much money we received this month, last month, and last year, in addition to all the money you expect to receive in the coming weeks" The video shows 'received year to date', not what was received last year.

Probably not worth re-recording the VO (it sounds professionally done), and re-encoding, but I figured you should know :)

As others have said, kudos on the design.

How much is "ballpark.com"?

But I don't have much work online to go for it :)

-- Not accepting PayPal is a bad point --