Alex LaGuardia

Posted on Apr 4

Three freelancer tools died in two months. I built the replacement.

#python #fastapi #ai #freelancing

HoneyBook hiked prices 89%. AND.CO shut down entirely. Bonsai got acquired by Zoom with no roadmap. All within two months of each other.

I'm a freelancer who was paying $29/mo for HoneyBook. I used two features: proposals and invoice reminders. That's it. Two features out of fifty. The other forty-eight were bloat I paid for and never touched.

Dubsado is so complex that a cottage industry of "setup specialists" charge $500-3,500 just to configure it. That tells you everything about how broken this market is.

So I built Stampwerk. Proposals, contracts, invoices, and follow-ups. $12/mo. No setup wizard. No onboarding call. No fifty features you'll never open.

What the AI actually does

This isn't "AI-powered" as a marketing checkbox. The AI does two specific things that freelancers hate doing manually.

1. Proposal generation. Answer 5 questions about a project and the LLM writes a full proposal -- scope, timeline, pricing breakdown, and payment terms.

# 5 inputs in, structured proposal out
response = groq_client.chat.completions.create(
    model="llama-3.3-70b-versatile",
    messages=[
        {"role": "system", "content": PROPOSAL_SYSTEM},
        {"role": "user", "content": json.dumps({
            "client": client_name,
            "description": project_desc,
            "budget_range": budget,
            "timeline": timeline,
            "deliverables": deliverables
        })}
    ],
    response_format={"type": "json_object"}
)

Not template-fill. The model reasons about scope and pricing based on the project description. You edit what it generates, not what a template assumes.

2. Invoice follow-ups. A background daemon runs hourly and chases overdue invoices on a 3-step escalation:

Day 3 -- friendly check-in
Day 7 -- professional reminder with payment link
Day 14 -- firm final notice

Each message matches the escalation stage. This is the part of freelancing that everyone hates and nobody does consistently. Now it runs while you sleep.

The full pipeline

The thesis behind Stampwerk is that these aren't separate features. They're one flow:

Client signs up (Google or magic link, 30 seconds)
Creates a project, answers 5 questions
AI generates the proposal
Client views it at a public link, accepts with one click
Contract auto-generates from the accepted proposal terms
Client e-signs
Milestones trigger invoices with Stripe payment links
Overdue invoices get automatic follow-ups

One pipeline. Every step feeds the next. No configuration, no "setup specialist" needed.

HoneyBook has all these features too. They also have fifty others, a $29-59/mo price tag, and an 89% price hike that tells you where they think the market is headed.

Why these tech choices

Layer	Choice	Why
Backend	FastAPI	42 routes, async, typed
Database	SQLite	One file, WAL mode, zero ops burden
AI	Groq + Llama 3.3 70B	Free inference, structured JSON output
Payments	Stripe	Payment links for clients, subscriptions for us
Email	Resend	Transactional email under 3K sends is free
Frontend	Next.js 14 + Tailwind	SSR, file routing, fast iteration

Total infrastructure cost: $0/mo. AI calls are free through Groq. Email is free at this scale. Stripe only charges when money moves. The whole thing runs on a single server I already had.

This matters because the competitors raised hundreds of millions. HoneyBook took $479M in funding. Dubsado bootstrapped to $2.5M ARR. Moxie raised ~$10M. When you compete against that, your margin has to be your moat. A $0 cost base means $12/mo is sustainable, not a loss leader.

Honest trade-offs

The retro arcade UI is polarizing. Some people think it's unprofessional for a business tool. I'm keeping it. If your target is corporate project managers, sure. If your target is solo freelancers who are tired of software that looks like every other SaaS dashboard, it works.

No PDF export yet. No time tracking. No QuickBooks integration. No mobile app. These are real gaps. But I'd rather ship the core pipeline right and add features from real user feedback than build fifty features nobody asked for.

That's how we got HoneyBook in the first place.

Try it

stampwerk.com -- free tier gives you 5 clients, 5 projects, and full AI proposals. Pro is $12/mo for unlimited.

Built with FastAPI, Next.js 14, SQLite, Groq, Stripe, and Resend. Questions about the stack or the business model welcome.

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