A few months ago I started doing shipping reps: I'd never taken anything all the way to production, so I picked a PDF generator more or less at random and used it to learn the whole thing. Database, domain, deploys, then payments, then subscriptions that behave. Every step pointed at the next one, which has been the fun of it. The one it's pointing at now is an actual user. So I went looking for people who need invoices, and mostly found other people who'd built invoice generators. Someone here even keeps a tracker (confab.sh). Invoicing tools are one of its biggest categories: 92 so far, most since July. I went through the list and the comments. What stood out: More than half are the same idea: free, no signup, runs in your browser. Hardly anyone mentions revenue. The most honest number I saw was 2 paying customers from about 100 installs. Nobody does the boring required stuff. Germany starts requiring e-invoices (a PDF with machine-readable data inside) from most businesses in 2027–28; I couldn't find one of the 92 that does it. Same for Japanese. The loudest complaint from real business owners wasn't design. It was deposit invoices: one Xero request has over 500 votes. So, to the people here who got first users in a crowded category: what actually worked? Not the textbook answer, the thing you'd do again. If you invoice clients and want to poke at mine, there's no sign-up: https://kouteisystems.com/invoice-generator?ref=rd-sideproject It's free, and it doesn't keep your invoice or the PDF. "This bit is annoying" is more useful to me than "looks nice".   submitted by   /u/CyberspaceAdventurer [link]   [comments]