Finance and accounting decision
SmartBill
A competent technical user can build and run a useful self-hosted invoicing replacement (multi-week effort) and open-source billing projects exist to accelerate it, so keep paying only if you need hosted convenience or vendor integrations.
Visit website↗Built by Lima Victor, who ships 6 products in this index
Not priced
No pricing page we fetched carried a figure, so there is nothing to compare against. The build side is still real.
$100one-off80 h to build
$20/mo6 h/mo upkeep
No published price to break even against.
Open-source builds that already do this
Every project below is open source and already does this job today. Fork one, self-host it, or take the parts you need - the build prompt further down assumes an empty file, and this is the shortcut past that. Licences differ; check the one on each card before you ship. All SmartBill alternatives, with the arithmetic →
What a replacement has to do
- Create and send invoices, record customers and payments, and store invoice PDFs.
What it still won’t have
- Bank feed / automatic payment reconciliation integrations
- Commercial SLA, support, and hosted uptime guarantees
- Any proprietary tax/compliance features or local legal guarantees
- Prebuilt integrations with accounting ecosystems
What remains hard
- Product polish and ongoing maintenance
First-year cost
No published price
SmartBill does not publish a price we could read, so there is nothing to compare against. What building costs is below.
Money you would actually spend
Time you would spend
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What you would spend
What we assumed
The verdict above measures whether you could build it. This one is only about money.
Runnable build prompt
Build a minimal self-hosted invoicing app using Django + PostgreSQL + React (or Svelte) and Docker. In scope: user auth, customer CRUD, invoice creation (line items, taxes), generate downloadable PDF invoices, store PDFs in Postgres or S3, send invoices via SendGrid/SMTP, record payments and update invoice status, basic search and export CSV. Out of scope: bank feed integrations, payroll, advanced tax jurisdiction rules, multi-currency FX accounting. Include error handling, unit and integration tests, Docker Compose for local dev, and scripted deployment steps.
How we checked
How the score was reached
- Build verdict base78
- An open-source build was found+5
- 4 cited sources+3
- Evidence score86
The base comes from the verdict. Everything under it is a check that either happened or did not, and each one is a fact frozen in this record rather than a judgement made at render time - so the same evidence always produces the same number.
How scoring works →Cited sources · 4
Every page the run actually retrieved.
- official productSmartBill about
- open sourceHasnayeen/invobook
- open sourcemeteroid-oss/meteroid
- open sourcenaiveHobo/InvoiceNet
Integrity checks
What held up, and what did not.