Why we built the free tier with 5 invoices a month (and why that matters)
Last autumn, a plumber from Swindon sent us a message. He'd just issued his first invoice through Invoicr on his phone while standing in a customer's kitchen. The invoice landed in the client's banking app within minutes. No card fees, no waiting for payment. He asked one question: 'Why is this free?' That conversation shaped how I think about what free actually means.
The 5 invoice question we keep getting
When we launched Invoicr, we made a deliberate choice: the free tier would handle 5 invoices per month and up to 3 customers. Not 1. Not unlimited. Five. The reason isn't technical stinginess. It's the opposite.
I spent the first six months after launch talking to tradespeople. Plumbers, electricians, decorators, gardeners. The insight that kept coming back was this: most sole traders and small teams don't need an invoicing app until they've already proven they have a business that works. Five invoices a month is roughly one working day of billing for someone running a tight operation. It's enough to test whether bank-to-bank payments actually solve the problem we built Invoicr to solve: that card processors take nearly three pounds in every ten on a £500 job.
If you're issuing more than five invoices a month, you've moved from 'testing the water' to 'running a real operation'. That's when the Pro tier makes sense. But we wanted the Free tier to be honest: good enough to discover whether the product fits, not good enough to run your entire business on forever.
What three customers actually teaches you
The three customer limit confused some people at first. Why not five? Why not ten? The answer came from watching how tradespeople work in reality, not in a case study.
Three customers is enough to learn whether your clients will use the client portal without friction. It's enough to discover whether you prefer to send invoices via WhatsApp (which costs nothing if you're on Free) or whether you need something else. It's enough to see what happens when you're owed money and you don't have automated reminders yet. You'll feel the pain of chasing payment manually.
Once you hit that limit, you're not frustrated by Invoicr. You're frustrated by the thing that Pro solves for you: unlimited invoices, unlimited customers, and payment reminders that send themselves. That's the right kind of friction. It means you've genuinely outgrown Free because your business has grown, not because we've crippled it to push you upmarket.
The bank-to-bank thing still surprises people
Free doesn't mean you're using a crippled payment method. On Free, you get the core feature we built Invoicr to deliver: bank-to-bank payment via UK open banking. No card processors. No 2.5% cut. A flat fee that costs roughly four quid on a £500 invoice instead of twelve and a half.
That's the whole point. A plumber in Leeds can issue an invoice to a domestic client, the client pays from their banking app, and the money lands in the plumber's account without a card middleman taking a slice. That's not a limitation. That's the product.
We could have put bank-to-bank payments behind the Pro paywall. It would have been easy. We didn't because it wouldn't have made sense. The reason someone chooses Invoicr isn't because they're tempted by a feature list. It's because they're tired of giving away money to payment processors.
What you can't do on Free (and when you'll feel it)
Let's be clear about what's missing. Automated payment reminders, for instance. On Free, if a client doesn't pay, you have to chase them manually. That's fine if you're issuing five invoices a month and you're close enough to your work to remember who owes you. Most people at that stage still have a mental list. Pro adds automated reminders that go out on a schedule you set.
WhatsApp delivery is another one. You can still send invoices to clients on Free. They just go the traditional way, not through WhatsApp. If your clients live in their banking apps and WhatsApp, that absence will sting. You'll upgrade. And that's the point.
Quotes are a Pro feature too. If you're doing estimate work, you'll miss them on Free. Again, if you're at the five invoice a month stage, you might not need formal quotes yet. But once you're bidding for bigger jobs, you will.
Why we didn't make Free too good
The temptation with free tiers is to make them so generous that paying customers wonder why they bother. We didn't do that because it would have been dishonest. Free is a one way ticket to understanding whether Invoicr works for your situation. It's not a permanent home for a real business doing real invoicing work.
If you're a plumber with ten regular clients and you're issuing thirty invoices a month, you need Pro. If you're a consultant running a solo practice and you're barely issuing two invoices a month, maybe Free is where you stay forever. Both are fine. But we wanted the boundary to be somewhere real, not arbitrary.
The Swindon plumber who messaged us in autumn? He's now on Pro. He told me the five invoice limit was the thing that made him trust the product. It meant we weren't pretending to offer something for nothing. We were offering exactly what we said we would, and when he needed more, we had something ready that was worth paying for.
If you're running a UK trade or small business and you've never tracked invoices on your phone before, the Free tier is genuinely there for you to find out whether bank-to-bank payments actually work the way you hope. The question isn't whether 5 invoices a month is enough. It's whether you'll outgrow it.