A free FreshBooks alternative
FreshBooks is accounting software that sends invoices. If invoicing is the part you use, you are renting a general ledger to do it. This is the other end of that trade: the invoice, free, and no accounting at all.
What you stop paying for
- The monthly fee. There is no plan here, so there is no seat and nothing to upgrade to — only ceilings, written down: 2,000 documents and 1,000 contacts an account, in all. Pricing lists the main ones.
- The client meter. Cheaper invoicing plans charge by the number of clients you bill; nothing here is priced per client, and the 1,000-contact ceiling is set against scripts, not against a business growing.
- Payment processing. Your client pays your bank account or your wallet directly, so nobody takes a percentage in the middle.
- A watermark. Nothing is stamped across the page. Every sheet and PDF does print one line in its footer, "Made with Perly Invoice", and there is no paid tier that takes it off, because there is no paid tier.
What you still get
- Free invoices and bills, in any ISO currency, with the document in English or Ukrainian.
- Recurring documents and due-date reminders.
- A link per invoice, so you can see when the client opened it, and a PDF that is the same sheet.
- Contacts frozen onto issued documents, each new document offered a number for the day it is written, and overdue worked out in the reader's own timezone.
- Crypto payment details on the sheet, which FreshBooks has no concept of.
What FreshBooks does that we do not
This is the part most comparison pages leave out, so: double-entry accounting, expense capture and bank feeds, time tracking, payroll, projects, proposals, a client portal, an accountant's login, tax reports, and card payments. If your bookkeeping lives in FreshBooks, Perly Invoice does not replace it — it replaces the invoicing screen, and you keep whatever you actually use for the books.
Nor does anything reach your client on its own: you send the link or the PDF yourself, from your own mail, and the due-date reminders come to you in Telegram rather than going to your client.
Who should actually switch
Freelancers and small studios who send invoices and do their books once a quarter with an accountant, and anyone whose clients pay in stablecoins — where a tool built around card rails has nowhere to put an address. If you need bank feeds and a P&L on demand, keep the subscription.
Common questions
- Is it free forever or free for now?
- Free. We do not sit between you and your money, so there is no transaction to price — there is no business model here that needs a paid tier. Pricing is a short page.
- Can I import my FreshBooks clients?
- Not automatically; there is no importer. Contacts are retyped once and then saved.
- Does it do expenses and time tracking?
- No. It makes invoices and records bills. Hours go on the invoice as a quantity at a rate; where you track them is your own business.
- Can my clients pay by credit card?
- Not through us — there is no card processing in the product. They pay the bank details or the wallet address printed on the document.
- What about Wave, Zoho Invoice or Invoice Simple?
- Same shape of answer: they are free or cheap and built on card rails, and none of them will print a wallet address and watch a chain for the payment. Compare on that, and on whether a percentage is taken.
Make one now
The generator is the front page. No account, no sign-up, no watermark — fill the document in and the PDF is yours.
Open the invoice generator