I got fed up with invoicing software, so I built my own in a week

In one line, I built Boring Invoices, multi-org invoicing for freelancers and small agencies, because every existing option was either bloated, ugly, or quietly charging me €29 a month to send a PDF. Took about a week, mostly vibe-coded with AI.

Here's the thing nobody warns you about running your own thing, the actual work is fine. It's the admin around the work that slowly eats you. And invoicing is the worst of it, not hard, just tedious, and somehow every tool built to fix it manages to make it worse.

So one week I stopped complaining and built the thing I wanted instead.

Why build another invoicing tool, aren't there a hundred?

There are. That's sort of the problem. I tried a lot of them. They fell into three camps.

• The bloated ones, accounting suites with invoicing bolted on, forty features I'll never touch, a UI that needs a tutorial.
• The pretty but precious ones, lovely until you have more than one business and everything falls apart.
• The free ones, free until the paywall, then €29 a month to send a document that is, functionally, a nice looking table.

None of them were built for the actual shape of my life, a few things going at once, offers and invoices, and zero patience for faff. Boring Invoices does exactly that and nothing more. Multi-org, create an offer, turn it into an invoice, track what's paid. That's the whole pitch. The name is the roadmap.

The admin tax is real, and it's not small

I'm not the only one bleeding time here. Freelancers lose an average of 204 hours a year to admin and paperwork, even now, with AI in the toolkit. Invoicing alone can eat up to 20% of a freelancer's workweek. And 71% of freelancers have had a payment stall at least once, which means chasing, which is more admin on top of the admin.

A full workday, every month, spent on invoices and reminders. That's not a workflow. That's a slow leak.

How I actually built it, in about a week

Two AI things worth being honest about, because AI-native gets thrown around a lot.

AI helped me build it. I vibe-coded most of it, describe what I want, get working code, refine, ship. What would've been a someday, when I have a spare month project became a this week project. That's the unlock for solo builders, the gap between annoyed by a problem and shipped a fix collapses from months to days.

AI is in the product, doing one specific job. It drafts offers. You give it the gist of a job, it writes the first-pass line items and descriptions, you tidy and send. Not AI-powered as a sticker, just the single most tedious part of the process, handed off. That's the bar I hold for putting AI in a tool, it should remove a real chore, not add a chatbot nobody asked for.

What I'd tell anyone sitting on a someday tool

“Build the boring version. The one that does the one thing that annoys you and stops there.”

It'll be live before the ambitious version has a logo. Mine's been useful since the Monday after I started.