I'm going to ground the cost numbers before I hand you a budget, since no-code platform pricing has shifted recently and I don't want you planning around stale figures.Straight talk before the plan: this is the single most crowded software category a solo founder can walk into. Clockify is free with unlimited users. Toggl Track, Harvest, Wave, Bonsai, FreshBooks — all mature, funded, and mostly free at the tier a freelancer needs. If your plan is "generic time tracker that also makes invoices," you will not win, and no amount of no-code polish fixes that. The plan below is built around the one thing that could make this worth your months: a sharp niche. I'll flag that decision as the make-or-break throughout, but you own it. ## Reality Check **The idea, in one sentence:** A web app where a freelancer logs the hours they worked and generates a client-ready invoice from those hours in a click. **The real problem and who has it:** The genuine pain isn't "I can't track time" — free tools solve that. It's "invoicing is fiddly, error-prone admin that eats my Friday afternoon and sometimes gets me paid late or wrong." The people who feel this most acutely are freelancers who bill *hourly to multiple clients* and have *specific invoice requirements* their generic tool handles badly — tax lines, legal fields, a particular format a client demands. A designer billing one client a flat monthly retainer does not have this problem. Be honest about which freelancer you're actually serving. **The three assumptions most likely to sink this:** 1. *"Freelancers will pay for this."* This is the weakest one. The market has trained freelancers to expect time tracking and basic invoicing for free. Your willingness-to-pay only exists if you solve something the free tools don't. If you can't name that thing in one sentence, stop before you spend money. 2. *"'Automatically' is the selling point."* Every competitor already turns hours into an invoice in a click. Automation is table stakes, not a differentiator. Betting the product on it means competing head-on with Harvest on their home turf. You'll lose. 3. *"A broad audience is safer than a narrow one."* Backwards. Broad means you compete with everyone and are better than no one. Your only realistic wedge as a no-code solo builder is being *unmissably* better for one specific group — e.g. a country's exact legal invoice format (in Spain: autónomo invoices with IVA and IRPF retention, and the incoming Verifactu rules that the big US tools handle poorly or not at all), or one profession's billing conventions (lawyers billing in 6-minute units, VAs, bookkeepers). A niche invoice-compliance angle is a real moat; "yet another timer" is not. **Verdict:** The idea isn't dead, but the generic version is. It's only worth building if you commit to a niche where you can be clearly better than free. That single choice decides whether this is a smart bet or a wasted quarter. **Must-haves (a freelancer literally cannot invoice without these):** - Log time entries: client/project, date, hours, description, hourly rate - Group entries into an invoice for a chosen client + date range - Generate a clean invoice with a real number, your details, client details, line items, subtotal, tax, total - Download the invoice as PDF and email it to the client - See invoice status: draft / sent / paid (marked manually) **Nice-to-haves (defer all of these):** - A live start/stop timer (surprisingly fiddly in no-code; manual entry is 90% of the value) - Collecting payment inside the app (Stripe payment links on the invoice) - Recurring invoices, expenses, multi-currency, reports, team members **Smallest genuinely useful version:** Manual time logging → one-click invoice from selected entries → branded PDF → email to client → mark paid. No live timer, no in-app payments. That is a complete, usable product a freelancer could run their billing on. **Assumptions I'm proceeding on (because you didn't specify):** you're a solo founder; budget is tight; you want to charge money eventually (you said public launch); V1 does *not* collect client payments; and you have *not yet picked a niche*. **Answer these before spending a euro or an hour:** 1. Which one type of freelancer is this for, specifically? 2. What do they get here that Clockify/Wave/Bonsai don't give them free? 3. Free, freemium, or paid — and at what price? 4. Which country's tax/invoice rules must the invoice satisfy on day one? 5. Do you have 5 real freelancers of that type who'll try it? (If no, get them before building.) ## Version 1 Plan **V1 includes:** freelancer sign-up/login; each user sees only their own data; add clients; add time entries (manual); select entries and generate an invoice; invoice as branded PDF; email the PDF to the client; mark invoices sent/paid; a simple dashboard listing invoices and their status; your own subscription billing via Stripe if you're charging. **V1 explicitly leaves out:** live start/stop timer, in-app client payments, recurring invoices, expenses, multi-currency, reports/analytics, team seats, mobile app. Every one of these is a V2 conversation, not a launch blocker. **Technical approach in plain English:** One no-code platform holds everything — the login system, a database with three main tables (Users, Clients, TimeEntries) plus an Invoices table, and the visual pages. "Privacy rules" make each freelancer's data invisible to every other freelancer, which is non-negotiable for a public app. When the user hits "Create invoice," a workflow gathers the selected time entries, calculates totals and tax, saves an Invoice record, and hands the data to a PDF plugin that produces the document. A dedicated email service sends that PDF to the client so it actually lands in their inbox. Stripe handles taking money from *your* users if you charge for access. No servers, no terminal, no code. **Build complexity: Medium** — the data model, per-user privacy, and PDF/email generation are all standard no-code work, but the invoice math, tax handling, and reliable email delivery have enough sharp edges that it's not a weekend "Simple" project. **Tools, accounts, and decisions required before you start building:** Accounts to create: 1. **Bubble** (bubble.io) — your app builder and database. Recommended over Softr/Airtable because a public, multi-tenant app with logins, per-user data isolation, invoice logic, and its own Stripe billing is exactly what Bubble does well and where sheet-based tools hit walls. Real cost: Bubble's free plan can't use a custom domain, so launching needs the **Starter plan at $29/month** (web, annual billing); plan to move to **Growth at $119/month** around your first paying customers, since Starter runs on shared servers. Prices confirmed current as of mid-2026 but Bubble changed its model recently, so check bubble.io/pricing before you commit. 2. **A PDF plugin inside Bubble** — start with a free/low-cost native one like "PDF Conjurer." If you need prettier, designed invoice templates later, an external service like PDFMonkey or APITemplate.io (~$0–19/month tiers) does that better; don't pay for it in V1. 3. **An email service** — Bubble's built-in email is unreliable for deliverability, and an invoice landing in spam is a launch-killer. Use **Postmark** (excellent for transactional/receipt-type email) or SendGrid via their Bubble plugin (free-to-~$20/month tiers). 4. **Stripe** — only if you're charging for access. No monthly fee; ~2.9% + €0.30 per transaction. 5. **A domain** — Namecheap or similar, ~€10–20/year. Decisions to lock before building (not after): - The niche and the one-sentence reason to switch (from the Reality Check). - Free vs. paid and the price. This shapes whether you even wire up Stripe in V1. - The country/tax model the invoice must satisfy. This shapes your invoice fields and math. - Whether client payment collection is in or out. Recommendation: **out** for V1. - Product name + domain. Realistic running cost at launch: roughly **€30–70/month** (Bubble Starter + email + domain), rising to ~€130–170/month once you're on Growth with paying users. That's your real floor. Budget it before you fall in love with the build. ## Build Roadmap Build in this order. Each step has a check — don't move on until it passes. 1. **Set up the Bubble app and data model.** Create Users, Clients, TimeEntries, Invoices tables with their fields (e.g. TimeEntry: linked client, date, hours, rate, description; Invoice: number, client, date range, list of entries, subtotal, tax, total, status). *Check:* you can manually add a test client and time entry in Bubble's database view and see them saved. 2. **Turn on sign-up/login and privacy rules.** Use Bubble's built-in user accounts. Then set privacy rules so a user can only read/write their own Clients, TimeEntries, and Invoices. *Check:* create two test accounts; confirm account B cannot see account A's data anywhere. This is the most important check in the whole build — a leak here ends the product. 3. **Build the client management page.** A page to add/edit/list clients (name, email, address, tax ID). *Check:* you can add three clients, edit one, and they show only for the logged-in user. 4. **Build time entry logging.** A form to add a time entry (pick client, date, hours, rate, note) and a list showing entries filtered by client and date range. *Check:* add several entries, filter to one client and one month, and the right entries appear with correct rates. 5. **Build invoice generation logic.** A "Create invoice" action that takes the filtered/selected entries, sums hours × rate per line, computes subtotal, applies tax, produces a total, assigns the next invoice number, and saves an Invoice record. *Check:* the saved totals exactly match a hand-calculation on paper for a mixed set of entries and rates. Do this with edge cases: zero-hour entries, decimals, one entry, fifty entries. 6. **Generate the PDF.** Wire the invoice data into the PDF plugin: your logo/details, client details, line items, totals, tax, invoice number, dates, payment terms. *Check:* the PDF opens cleanly, numbers match the record, and it holds up with a long client name, many line items, and a €0 tax case. *Genuine choice here:* native plugin (PDF Conjurer) vs. external templating service (PDFMonkey/APITemplate). Native is free and self-contained but the layout is more manual; external gives designer-grade templates but adds a subscription and an integration. **Recommendation:** native plugin for V1. A clean, correct PDF beats a beautiful one you launched two weeks later. 7. **Send the invoice by email.** Connect Postmark/SendGrid; send the PDF (or a link to it) to the client's email with a short message. *Check:* send to your own inbox *and* a Gmail account; confirm it lands in the inbox, not spam, with the PDF intact. 8. **Build the dashboard and status flow.** List invoices with client, amount, date, and status; buttons to mark Sent and Paid. *Check:* status changes persist and the list reflects them after a refresh. 9. **Add your own billing (only if charging).** Use Bubble's Stripe plugin to gate the app behind a subscription or free trial. *Check:* a test-mode Stripe purchase unlocks access and a cancellation revokes it. *Genuine choice:* charge from day one vs. launch free and add billing later. **Recommendation:** if you have a real niche and 5 warm users, charge a low price from launch — free users teach you nothing about willingness to pay, which is the exact assumption most likely to sink you. ## Polish Checklist This is a public launch, so this section is not optional — it's the difference between a tool people trust with their money and a prototype they abandon. **Errors and edge cases to handle:** - Invoice with zero entries selected → block it with a clear message, don't generate an empty invoice. - Missing client email → block sending, prompt to add it. - Duplicate/sequential invoice numbers → guarantee numbers never repeat and never skip (tax authorities care; some countries legally require unbroken sequences). - Negative or absurd hours/rates → validate on input. - Decimal and rounding behavior on tax and totals → pick a rounding rule and apply it consistently, or your PDF and your record will disagree by a cent and look untrustworthy. - Email send failure → tell the user it failed and let them retry, rather than silently marking it sent. - Half-finished actions if the user closes the tab mid-generation → make sure no broken invoice record is left behind. **Speed and usability fixes that matter most:** - Keep database queries lean — on Bubble, sloppy filtering burns Workload Units and slows pages, which costs you money and users. Filter at the database level, not by loading everything and filtering on screen. - Make "log a time entry" reachable in one click from the dashboard; it's the most-repeated action, so friction there is friction everywhere. - Pre-fill the rate from the client's default so users aren't retyping it. - Show a loading state on invoice generation so it doesn't feel frozen. **Design details that make it feel finished, not homemade:** - Remove all Bubble branding (Starter plan allows this) and use a real domain — a bubbleapps.io URL screams prototype. - One consistent, restrained color/font set; a proper logo on both the app and the invoice PDF. - The invoice PDF is your actual product surface — it goes to *your users' clients*. Make it genuinely clean and professional; it's your best free marketing. - Empty states that guide ("No clients yet — add your first") instead of blank pages. - A real transactional email template (from-name, reply-to, footer) so invoices look legitimate, not like a script. ## Launch and Handoff **Deploy / publish (matched to a public launch):** 1. Move the app to Bubble's **Starter plan** and connect your custom domain (Bubble walks you through the DNS records at your registrar — no terminal). 2. Verify your sending domain in Postmark/SendGrid (SPF/DKIM records at your registrar) so invoices don't hit spam. Confirm with test sends to Gmail, Outlook, and a business domain. 3. Switch Stripe from test to live keys if charging; run one real €1 transaction and refund it. 4. Do a full dry run as a brand-new user: sign up, add a client, log hours, generate, email, mark paid — on the live domain, on a phone and a laptop. 5. Soft-launch to your 5 warm freelancers first, not the public. Fix what they hit. *Then* announce. **Maintenance you can do yourself, plainly:** - **Weekly:** skim Bubble's App Metrics for Workload Unit usage (this is your bill) and check for errors in the logs. Send yourself a test invoice to confirm email still delivers. - **Monthly:** review your Bubble plan vs. usage; if you're consistently near your WU limit or you've got paying customers on the shared Starter server, move to Growth. - **When adding anything:** always re-test the two-account privacy check from Roadmap step 2. It's the one thing that can quietly break and genuinely hurt users. - **Keep a backup habit:** periodically export your app data from Bubble so you're not solely dependent on the platform. - **Watch the boring legal stuff:** invoice-numbering and tax rules in your target country can change (Spain's Verifactu is a live example). A rule change can require an update. **The single most valuable V2 direction:** Whatever your first users complain about *most* while trying to get paid — that's V2, and shipping V1 is how you find it. My prediction, worth testing: the highest-value addition won't be the live timer, it'll be **getting the freelancer paid faster** — a "Pay now" Stripe/link button on the invoice so their client pays in two clicks and the app auto-marks it paid. That turns you from "a nicer invoice maker" (weak, crowded) into "the tool that gets freelancers paid" (a reason to switch and to pay you). But let real user pain confirm it before you build it. --- **The single next action to take today:** Don't open Bubble. Write one sentence — "This is for [specific freelancer] and it's better than the free tools because [specific reason]" — and take it to 3–5 real freelancers of that type to see if it makes them lean in. If it doesn't, you've saved yourself a quarter. If it does, you now have a niche, testers, and a reason to build. Everything above only pays off once that sentence is true.