Comment by conductr

While all well and true. Some scale is assumed.

There’s plenty of need for basic use invoicing like this. Generate an invoice as a way to bill someone or serve as an estimate for work/project cost. Not everyone is at a place where it needs to be so formal and integrated into a complete solution that tracks the dollars from invoice to balance sheet to income statement, etc. It’s a lot especially for people that are just freelancing and need a similar probably infrequent way to send a bill. They probably are just tracking things in a spreadsheet and not even big enough to use quickbooks or anything else. It would be a poor use of time and over engineering to put that all in place and setup things that cost subscription dollars in perpetuity just to bill for a one off charge. Or even a handful of them.

When I think of people I pay, my lawn guy and my housekeeper both just text me how much I owe them. Then I zelle them. They both have dozens of clients at least and I imagine they are doing this way for them all. If I were a business, in May insist on getting an invoice to load the AP into an accounting flow from my end but they wouldn’t really want to change their system of doing things just to comply with my request. So, they may want something like this that just basically converts the text message info into an official looking invoice.

I feel the real problem is everyone is assuming this side project type thing to solve every edge case that exists in the world. Even the bigger guys like stripe. That’s the wrong take. They offer a solution, you have to evaluate of it fits your needs, if not, use something else. If you’re in a locale that mandates something completely different, use something else. This project is being very transparent about what it does and how it works, which should help you out if you have a requirements list to compare it to.