Productivity

Freelancers, Bill Like a Boss: 19 Self-hosted Free Invoice Generators

Hazem Abbas

Mar 21, 2024 — 12 min read

Freelancers often need to generator invoices for their customers, some may have accounting, personal finance and billing solutions, others use invoice templates to generate invoices for their provided services.

However, an invoice generator app can save them time, and enables freelancers to keep track of their paid and unpaid invoices, regular customers, and issue legal and highly customizable invoices with no time.

This not only saves time, but it also ensures that the invoices are professional-looking and include all the necessary details such as the freelancer's contact information, description of the services, costs, and payment terms.

Moreover, many invoice generator apps also have additional features like tracking payments, which can be incredibly beneficial for freelancers to manage their finances.

If you are a freelancer, a coder, developer, SEO consultant or even an agency, this list is for you.

1. InvoiceLion

InvoiceLion is a free and open-source self-hosted invoicing software that enables anyone to create and export unlimited invoices with ease.

It is written using PHP and can be easily installed and run on any PHP-supported server.

Recommended for

Freelancers
Small businesses
Web Agencies

2. Manta

Manta is a free and open-source desktop app to create beautiful invoices. It supports multiple languages out-of-the-box including RTL languages.

However, it is important to note that the project did not receive any update for years.

Features

🎚 Flexible form. You can turn on/off field and save as default setting.
🏗 Drag & drop for reordering items. This makes editing easier.
📐 Use SVGs for logo for better printing.
🎨 Custom designed & highly customizable templates.
🏷 Custom statuses for invoices.
📊 Export PDF for print or email.
🔒Complete Privacy. You financial data stays where it belongs.
💯 Totally Free.

Platforms

Windows
Linux: Ubuntu, Fedora, Debian, Arch, Linux Mint.
macOS

3. Crater

Crater is a beautifully crafted web-based invoicing solution that can generate highly customizable invoices, keep track of your exported invoices, customers and many more.

You can view all of its amazing features in our post here.

4. Invoice Generator

The Invoice Generator is a React open-source project that allows for the addition of itemized items, configuration of quantities, prices, tax rates, and discounts.

It also enables the download of invoices as PDFs to your device, using jspdf-react to convert the data from canvas to PDF.

Features

Create, Modify, Delete, and View Invoices: Manage your invoices through a user-friendly interface.
Redux Store Integration: Efficient data handling through Redux for application state management.
Responsive Layout: Consistent and user-friendly experience across various devices and screen sizes.
LocalStorage Integration: Browser's LocalStorage used to store and retrieve data, providing persistence for invoices.
Error Handling: Robust error handling for maintaining application stability.

5. Invoice.js

Invoice.js is an open-source tool for generating PDF invoices using JavaScript. It utilizes pdfkit for invoice generation and md5 hashing to consolidate similar products on the invoice. Contributions to the code are welcomed and will be incorporated.

6. OpenSourceBilling

OpenSourceBilling (OSB) is a free, open-source web application for easy invoice creation, payment receipt, client management, and tracking and reporting.

It offers features such as recurring invoices, PDF exporting, time tracking, accepting payments via Paypal and credit card, and data import from Freshbooks and Quickbooks. OSB supports multiple languages and currencies, providing flexibility and convenience.

7. ATOS

ATOS is a free self-hosted open-source app that built for freelancers to generate and manager invoices for their clients easily. Moreover, it also allows freelancer developers, designers, seo link builders, to keep track of their customers, tasks and manage projects in productive manner.

Features

Client Management: Manage clients and companies from a unified dashboard.
Project Management: Track tasks and use ATOS for independent project management.
Task Management: Group tasks into collections and bill against billable tasks.
Invoicing: Generate detailed invoices from completed tasks.
Estimated Taxes: Estimate yearly tax burden with customizable tax files.
Reports: Create client reports with customized templates.
Open-source AGPL-3.0 License.

8. BiznisBox

BiznisBox is a free, open-source web application for small and medium-sized businesses to manage invoices. It integrates with Stripe, PayPal for payments, and Nordigen for bank account data.

9. Miru

Miru is not just an invoicing app, it is an amazing time-tracker app that enables freelancer developers, coders, pentesters, and devops to bill their clients based on their working hours.

Miru is a feature-rich app that include a client portal, customer management, team management, report page, and integerate with many payment gateways as Stripe.

The app is in active development, so more features are coming in every major upgrade.

10. InvoicePlane

InvoicePlane is a free and open-source self-hosted invoicing solutions for freelancers and SMB agencies.

11. React Invoice Generator

React Invoice Generator is an open-source project built as its name suggest using React.js to help developers create clean beautiful invoices with ease.

12. QuickBill

QuickBill is a free open-source web-based app that enables anyone to create fancy customizable invoices easily.

However, it is important to note that the project did not receive any update for years, but it is still usable.

13. Invoify

Invoify is a robust, web-based invoice generator application, expertly built using cutting-edge technologies such as Next.js 13, TypeScript, React, and the Shadcn UI library. It delivers an unmatched, effortless experience for creating and managing top-tier professional invoices.

14. Billing-System

This is a cross-platform Java-based open-source billing system that enables anyone to create PDF invoice with few clicks.

However, It requires some technical knowledge to install and run.

15. Invoicr

Invoicr is a free and open-source PHP invoice generator that is capable of churning out HTML, PDF, DOCX, and PNG invoices. It is a simple fuss-free package that will give developers a quick boost with their invoice generation needs.

16. PDF Invoice Generator

This is a web-based PDF invoice generator that is written using PHP, Nette Framework.

17. React Invoice

This is a React app that can be easily installed on platforms like Vercel, to create and manage multiple invoices without the need for login or authentications.