My Product - FusionInvoice

Show Bootstrapped
#1

FusionInvoice is a product of mine, currently free and open source (https://www.fusioninvoice.com). It aims to provide the same functionality as a lot of hosted services do (Freshbooks, Harvest, etc), but you download the product and install it on your own server.

Right now is a critical point for me with FusionInvoice - currently it is a free and open source product. I’m working on sketching out what will be called the “Pro” version right now - which is kinda stressing me a bit because I really don’t want to put much more effort into a CodeIgniter app… so very seriously considering moving it over to Laravel sooner than later.

I plan to keep a “core” version available for free, forever, which provides all of the features currently available in the product. The Pro version will offer things that have been requested that would provide awesome features which would fit in this type of a product, but that aren’t necessary for a simple (core) invoicing app.

In terms of the actual features I’m planning on for the pro version, I’m trying to abide by the whole “radio silence” principal and not give out any of the details just yet…

Ok, so there you have it. I appreciate input and criticism, so have at it!

#2

Radio silence? I don’t think that’s a great idea. For tiny products like ours, it is hard to get noticed. It is even harder to get noticed if you don’t tell people what you are doing.

#3

I’m very surprised by the “self-hosted only” mode, because most people I know do not want to self-host, they want something that works online! Of course make due diligence and verify that people would buy this etc, but to me this is off-putting.

As well, I find that starting with a freemium model is probably tough for a bootstrapped thing. My current opinion is that freemium is great if you need some mass effect, otherwise I’m afraid it will take a very long time to get profitable, and will have increasing costs.

Just a thought! I’m very curious to see what other people here think.

#4

Yeah - there are so many options out there already to choose from for service based invoicing. Only a couple of others that I’m aware of that let you download it and host it yourself. Personally, I’d rather host something on my own than pay a monthly fee. I wouldn’t say it’s excessive by any means, but there’s a market for it.

My initial market, I believe, will be users of the current product who need the additional functionality that pro will provide… stuff that has been requested many times but didn’t quite fit into the core product itself.

Another thing is, this will be my first venture into this side of things, so I expect to make mistakes, bad (hopefully not horrible) decisions, etc, with the expectation of learning from it.

Once this gets launched, I’ve got a service I plan to build and launch which I believe will appeal to a much larger market… so, trying a few different ways of doing things to learn.

#5

Forgot to ask - what did you mean by this? What types of costs?

#6

I think he meant that if you run a freemium saas app which is successful, you’ll have to support a lot of free users for the sake of possibly a few paying users, those free users will ‘eat’ resources just as the paying users while converting a free user to a paying one is harder than it seems

#7

Ok yeah, that I could understand. FI isn’t / won’t be a service. Users download it and host it on their own servers / resources.