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Comment by jprince | Hacker News Reader

Currently, I use On The Job, which works really well at invoicing and time tracking. What I do is I PDF the invoice and email it to clients, and have them pay me via Square Cash. As long as I don't do more than 2500$ of work for any particular client in a given week, they can easily use that.

It costs them nothing and it costs me nothing to do this, and there is no percentages taken. Also, we both understand when payment is due, and normally the client pays on the due date. If they don't pay on the due date no amount of pretty software is going to make them more likely to, for obvious reasons. How do you plan to get me to give away 3.9% of my income to use a more integrated service?

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Jprince, that's a nice setup. You've manually put together many of the core components Tiempo offers. It sounds like you're getting paid quickly, at low cost, and its a good experience for both you and your customers.

In fact, what you could do is use Tiempo for your time tracking and use the result to create your PDF invoice and continue with your Square Cash payment process. Compared to On the Job, Tiempo's time tracking is free and available on mobile devices. So you wouldn't have to be attached to your computer to track time.

But, what Tiempo Instant Invoices does is allow folks that aren't as technical to get all of that benefit that you've already wired together in one place. And, as I've said elsewhere in the comments, we'll add more payment options (that are lower cost) in the future.

Hackers like us forget how hard some of this stuff is to put together, and time consuming.

Once you've invested time into your homegrown system, your product inertia grows a great deal. "Why do x when you could just do y,z,a,b,c together?" should be a red flag to folks like us that we're not really suggesting something easier for other people, even if it's easier for us.

Reminds me of this Dropbox critique when it first got featured on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

If you guys are interested in getting these costs down, my company KnoxPayments.com could help. Without credit card fees, it's easier to charge way less and still have a solid system.

Cool! Let's chat. I'll reach out to you.

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