FreshBooks costs $19/mo — and unlike a tool you buy once, that bill never stops. Over three years that's roughly $684 for software doing a job your own hardware could just as easily do.
Where the subscription actually goes
$19/month ($228/yr) is the sticker price. It compounds: cancel and you typically lose access to your own history, and most plans ratchet the price up as you add usage, seats or storage — the bill rarely stays flat for long.
Billcraft: the pay-once alternative
Billcraft does the same core job for $39, once. Clients, invoices, PDFs, share links & recurring billing — on hardware you control.
| Billcraft | FreshBooks | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | $39 once | $19/month ($228/yr) |
| Clients | Unlimited | 5 billable clients (Lite) |
| Your data | On your machine/server | Their cloud |
| Invoices + PDF + share links | Yes | Yes |
| Recurring invoices | Yes | Yes |
| Email via your own SMTP | Yes | No (their sender) |
| Works offline (desktop mode) | Yes | No |
| Source code | MIT, yours | Closed |
Two months of FreshBooks pays for Billcraft outright. Everything after that is free, forever.
Is the subscription ever still worth it?
If you need FreshBooks's specific ecosystem, integrations or managed infrastructure and that's genuinely load-bearing for you, the subscription earns its keep — that's a real trade-off, not a trick. Billcraft is for everyone else: people paying every month for a job that runs fine on hardware they already own.
Try Billcraft — $39, once
Clients, invoices, PDFs, share links & recurring billing — on hardware you control.