My invoicing app held my data hostage, so I built my own

I build websites and apps for a living. Most of my clients come from Freelancer and a few other gig sites, and for about two years I sent every one of them an invoice through Invoice Simple. It did the job. The design felt stuck in 2015, but it worked, so I never thought twice about it.

Then work went quiet for a couple of months. No new projects, nothing to bill, so I cancelled the subscription. It felt like the obvious thing to do. Why pay for an invoicing app when you have nothing to invoice.

A new client came in a few weeks later. I opened the app to copy an old invoice and send a fresh one. Everything was right there on the screen. My clients, my past invoices, two years of my own work. But the second I tried to open or export any of it, a paywall slid up. I could see my data. I just could not have it unless I started paying again.

That was the moment something broke for me. Those were my invoices. My clients. My records. I made them. And they were being held just out of reach until I paid up.

Wait, is it just me?

I figured maybe I had missed something in the fine print. So I went to the reviews to see if anyone else had hit the same wall.

It was not just me. It was thousands of people.

Same story over and over. People who had run their small business through one of these apps for years, then lost access to their own history the moment they stopped paying or a plan quietly changed.

So I went down a rabbit hole

I started reading every one star review I could find across the popular invoice apps, and a few clear patterns showed up.

Free, until it is not. Bookipi was known as a free app. In early 2025 it moved to paid and capped the free version at three invoices a month. You can guess how that went down with people who had built a habit around it.

The mid subscription downgrade. People already on a paid plan would suddenly find that plan getting worse, not better.

And the one that hit closest to home, data held hostage. Not lost. Not deleted. Just locked behind a payment.

I tried a handful of the alternatives myself too. Invoice2go, Invoice Fly, a few others. Same shape every time. Easy to start, and then slowly fenced in, with my data as the thing keeping me there.

The part that made me angry

Here is what actually got to me. None of this is an accident.

When you invoice clients through an app, you put your whole business into it. Your client list. Your numbers. Your tax records. Once that is in there, leaving is painful, and these companies know it. The harder it is for you to walk away, the more you keep paying. The lock-in is not a bug. It is the plan.

And the prices made it worse. I do not mind paying for software I use every day. But three invoices a month for the price of a coffee run, with your own data taped to it, is not a fair trade. The price was not really the problem. The value behind the price was.

This is not a few cranky users. It is a pattern nobody in the industry seems to want to name out loud.

So I built my own

I am a developer. At some point the obvious thought hit me. I could just build the invoice app I actually wanted.

So I did. I built Pocket Invoice, and I built it as the opposite of everything that frustrated me.

Then my friends wanted it

I gave it to a few friends who freelance and run small jobs, mostly to get feedback and shake out bugs. They just kept using it. A couple of them told me it was the first invoice app that did not make them feel like they were being set up for something later.

That is when it stopped feeling like a thing I built only for myself.

So we are releasing it

Here is what I will put in writing.

And if you are reading this because you are stuck in another app right now, fighting to get your own invoices out, hold on. I am putting together a simple way to help people get their data unstuck.