For a couple of years I used a free online invoice builder. It was fine. Not great, not terrible — fine. I'd fill in the fields, download the PDF, send it to the client, done.
Then one day a client asked me for something trivial: send the invoice without his email on it. He had his reasons, he asked nicely, and honestly — why would that ever be a problem? It's my invoice. It's his email. Neither of us wants it printed there.
The invoice builder disagreed. The email field was required. Not "recommended" — required, with a red asterisk and everything. No setting, no toggle, no workaround. A tool whose whole job is to output a piece of paper with numbers on it decided it knows better than both parties on that piece of paper.
I sat there genuinely annoyed at a form field. Then I did what any developer with slightly too much confidence does: I built my own.
Half a year of a tool nobody knew existed
The first version was strictly for me. Local web app, one user (me), SQLite file as the database, no accounts, no cloud. My details, my clients, line items, taxes, currencies, PDF out. Every field optional except the ones that actually make an invoice an invoice: number, date, currency.
I used it for about six months to invoice my real clients. That's the best product validation I know: not a landing page test, not a survey — just me, every month, choosing my own tool over the alternatives because it respects how I actually work.
Somewhere along the way it got the small things I always wanted: snapshots (editing a client's details doesn't silently rewrite old invoices), payment details per currency, custom fields, sections I can toggle off when a client asks for something weird. Which they do. That's the whole point.
Turning it into NeatDue
A few weeks ago I decided to ship it properly. Rebuilt it as a real multi-user service, gave it a name — NeatDue — and a one-line philosophy: minimal invoices, professional PDFs, no accounting bloat.
It's not accounting software. No double-entry bookkeeping, no expense tracking, no dashboards pretending your freelance income is a Fortune 500 P&L. You make an invoice, you get a clean PDF, you get paid. That's it.
The parts I care about survived the rewrite:
- Try it without an account. There's a free invoice generator — no signup, fill it in, download the PDF. If you like it, an account saves your clients and invoices for next time.
- Almost everything is optional. Including, yes, the client's email.
- Free tier that's actually usable: 5 invoices a month, 3 clients. Pro ($9/mo or $59/yr) removes the limits and the watermark and lets you add your logo.
The experiment part
Here's the second reason this post exists: NeatDue is also a marketing experiment, and I'm running it in public.
I'm going to grow this thing with SEO only. No paid ads, no growth hacks, no cold DMs. Just useful content, programmatic pages that solve real searches, and patience — because I've already learned the expensive way (with another product) that paid traffic without search intent bounces in three seconds, and that a Product Hunt launch without an audience is a party where nobody shows up.
So: blog posts that answer real invoicing questions, free tools, backlinks from directories, and months of waiting for Google to care. I'll share the numbers as they come — including the embarrassing early ones, which right now look like "a handful of visitors, most of them me."
If you invoice clients and you've ever been annoyed by a required field, try NeatDue. And if you're here for the SEO experiment — subscribe or check back; the first traffic report will land when there's traffic to report.