Stripe charges up to $2 just to send an invoice email… so I built my own tool

I haven’t posted here in a while, but I’m back to share a new project I’ve been working on.
While working on a few projects using Stripe, I noticed something frustrating.

When you receive a payment, Stripe already takes ~2.9% + $0.30 in processing fees.

But if you want to send the customer an invoice using Stripe Invoicing, they charge an additional 0.4% per invoice sent (max $2) - just to generate the PDF and send the email!!!! 🤯

Example:
$100 payment
~ $3.20 processing fee
~ $0.40 invoice fee

It doesn’t sound like much, but it adds up really quickly.
If you have 100 customers and send 12 invoices per year, that's 1,200 invoices.

At up to $2 per invoice, that can be $2,400/year just for sending PDFs, separate from transaction fees 🤯

So I built a small tool that generates invoices directly from Stripe payments without using Stripe’s invoicing system.

There’s very little competition in this niche, but most existing tools don’t properly handle European tax regulations. And if you’ve ever dealt with bureaucracy in Poland or the EU, you know it’s a completely different level compared to the US 😅

One thing that makes this tool stand out is that it’s EU VAT compliant, including:

Automatic reverse charge for EU B2B
Export notation for non-EU customers
Domestic VAT handling for local sales
For me this is also a weekend project that solves a real problem I personally had, but maybe it will help others too.

The MVP took about 3 days to build while I was on vacation in Riyadh (and during Ramadan there isn’t that much to do anyway 😄)

My goal for March is to get the first 5 customers, and then try to start scaling it from there.

Keep shipping 🚀🚀🚀🚀