i made a dumb little freelance invoice spreadsheet because i kept losing receipts

techinpanko — Sat, 05 Sep 2026 22:53:54 +0000

i kept making freelance invoices in blank docs and then wondering where the receipts went.

not my finest system.

so i made a dumb little spreadsheet to keep the boring bits in one place:

invoices, without starting from a totally blank page
expenses, so receipts have somewhere to live
a rough tax set-aside view (not tax advice, obviously)
a basic client list
a small dashboard so i can see what’s going on without opening 14 tabs

it works in both Excel and Google Sheets. nothing fancy. no app to learn. just cells, formulas, and fewer tiny admin fires.

if you’re new to freelancing and want to try the smallest version, i put out a free invoice-only sample:
https://payhip.com/b/A4tQU

and if you want the full invoice + expenses + clients + dashboard pack, it’s $9:
https://payhip.com/b/ROHw3

made by Hatchery Records. hope it saves somebody else from my receipt-hoarding era.

i wrote down ~100 public saas pricing pages so i'd stop guessing

techinpanko — Sat, 05 Sep 2026 21:55:39 +0000

I kept pricing off gut instinct + one competitor for way too long.

You know the move. competitor is $29 so you're $19. or you're $49 because "premium." neither is a strategy. it's just… anchoring with extra steps, so i did something kind of dumb and kind of useful: opened a bunch of public pricing pages and wrote them down. analytics tools, email tools, form builders, newsletter stuff, hosting, that kind of indie/bootstrappy SaaS. no login walls. if i couldn't see a number, i didn't invent one.

Sticker prices were less useful than noticing the shape:

where free cuts off
what the mid tier is actually selling (usually "remove friction," not "more features")
whether the unit is seats, usage, projects, subscribers, etc.

copying one competitor's number skips all of that.

if you want the sheet

I packaged it as an excel workbook (pricing tab + a patterns tab + a blank experiments sheet). yellow/uncertain cells mean i refused to make a number up.

free 12-row sample: https://payhip.com/b/0Ubzu
full ~100 comps: https://payhip.com/b/l72jY ($19)

otherwise curious how people here actually did comps when they first shipped. interviews? gut? one rival's page? something else?
ended up with ~100 rows in a spreadsheet. product, category, url, model (flat / seat / usage / freemium+paid / whatever), entry/mid/top when it was on the page, free tier y/n, annual discount if obvious, a short note, date checked.

what got boring after enough of them

some of it stops being interesting once you've seen it twenty times:

usable free tiers that do one real job, then you pay to remove branding / raise limits / unlock collab. not the "7-day demo of everything" free.
annual is weirdly consistent. like, ~two months free / ~15–20% off shows up a lot.
a ton of indie entry prices live in this unglamorous $9–25 band. not always, but enough that "$79 starter" starts looking like a choice, not a default.
not everything is per-seat. flat-by-project / flat-by-workspace shows up more than i expected. i wasn't really looking for that at first.

none of that is a law. it's just what kept repeating on public pages.

DEV Community: techinpanko

i made a dumb little freelance invoice spreadsheet because i kept losing receipts

i wrote down ~100 public saas pricing pages so i'd stop guessing

if you want the sheet

what got boring after enough of them