Blinksale, but not because I think their great.

Posted by Jamie

October 20, 2008

Over the past few weeks I’ve been thinking about some of the really great web applications that I use. I’ve posted about Coda and Dropbox to name a few and I love Google Docs but one that should be on that list is my invoicing application.

I use Blinksale almost everyday and have done so for probably almost 4 years. They were one of the first invoicing applications that I came across and was instantly hooked. I was working for another company at the time and thought it was useful for freelancing invoices and small side projects.

As time went on my client list grew and I started to rely heavily on my account history for taxes and so on. Now that I’m self employed and have been for 2 years my use of an invoicing program is essential. As my business grew unfortunately Blinksale has not grown with it. I’ve really started to outgrow it as it lacks heavily in many departments when comparing features with Freshbooks or Harvest. I’ve emailed them several times asking when they will be rolling out new features but the response is always the same, in planning. In general I’ve found their pricing structure to be pretty good until you want PDF invoices then the price doubles from $12 to $24 a month, which I feel is unrealistic when you compare what $14 gets you at Freshbooks.

I’ve never expected to use Blinksale for this long and I don’t think they ever claimed to be great for every business. It’s a good tool for people getting started with freelancing or who are looking for a simple option for invoicing. They are clearly happy with the current state of Blinksale or they would have implemented updates long ago.

There are plenty of great invoicing options out there, just look around for one that suits your needs and fits your business. Some features that I look forward to are estimates, time-tracking, client management and pdf invoices.

Now that I’ve outgrown Blinksale and I have to start thinking about switching applications, which doesn’t seem all that easy either however, Ben at Freshbooks has been very kind in migrating my invoice/client data over. Although I haven’t started using my Freshbooks account yet I know it will be a good fit for me when I do.

Compare Features

Blinksale