Professional Invoicing Without Monthly SaaS Fees: Getting Started with Invoice Ninja

For a freelancer or small business sending 20 invoices per month, FreshBooks costs $19.50 per month. QuickBooks Simple Start costs $35 per month. Over three years, that is $700 to $1,260. Invoice Ninja provides the same functionality -- invoice creation, expense tracking, time tracking, project management, client portal, payment gateway integration -- with no recurring cost. Self-host it once and use it for years.

What Invoice Ninja Does

Invoice Ninja is an open-source invoicing and billing platform built with Laravel. It supports professional invoice templates with custom branding, automated recurring invoices, expense tracking with receipt upload, time tracking with project billing, a client-side portal where customers view and pay invoices, and integrations with Stripe, PayPal, and other payment gateways. It also handles quotes, proposals, credit notes, and tax rate configuration.

Invoices can be sent by email with PDF attachments. Recurring invoices are automatically generated and sent on schedule. Payment reminders follow up with overdue clients. The client portal lets customers view their invoice history, pay outstanding balances, and download receipts without emailing you every time.

Invoice Ninja runs on PHP with MySQL or PostgreSQL. For a single freelancer, it runs on a small VPS with 1GB RAM. For a team with multiple users and role-based permissions, deploy on 2GB RAM or more. Docker images are available for straightforward deployment behind a reverse proxy.

VPS1 deploys Invoice Ninja with payment gateway integration, SSL, and automated backups. See specifications on our Invoice Ninja software page.