The Zlog

Biller: making getting paid feel lighter

  • biller
  • product
  • tooling

Most invoice tools arrive with a decision to make before you have written a single line. Pick a plan. Create an account. Choose a template from four hundred. Connect a payment processor. Then fill in the form.

You wanted to send an invoice.

Biller is at biller.zerofy.me, and it does the opposite. The workspace is three numbered sections and you can finish one without signing up for anything.

The Biller mark: a line-drawn invoice with a folded corner and a dollar-sign coin, above the word biller, on a dark green square bordered by illustrations of a checklist, a target, coins and a calculator
Biller. The dark green and the hard lines came first; the invoice corner is the only thing that folds.

Three sections, in order

The whole editor is a single scrolling page, and it is ordered the way you actually do the job.

01 / Details is you and the invoice. Your name, your invoice number, your address, the date, the due date, and the currency. Five currencies ship today — USD, EUR, GBP, INR and AUD — because picking one should not be a reason to close the tab.

02 / Recipient is the customer. Name, email, address. That is the whole section, because it is the only part your client will actually read.

03 / Line items is the work. Description, quantity, price, amount, and an Add item button when you have more than one. Below that sit a tax rate, a discount amount, and a free-text notes field.

Then it totals itself. Subtotal, tax, total due, recalculating as you type, with a live preview of the printed page beside it.

The first ten invoices are free

Here is the part that surprised us to build. You do not need an account to start. Biller tracks a guest quota of ten invoices, and only when you are about to run out does it ask who you are.

Past that it is ₹99 a month, or ₹999 a year, and the account is what unlocks unlimited invoices, invoice history, custom header names, and removing the watermark from the free tier. The watermark stays on free invoices because the free tier is a real, working product rather than a trial, and a small mark is a fairer price than a nag.

If you want the invoice history, you want the free account anyway. It is the cheapest part of the product.

The unglamorous parts we kept

A signature and stamp area. Because in most of the markets we work in an invoice without one gets asked about, and the answer should not be a Zoom call.

Save, preview, clear. You can save a draft, come back to it, print it as a PDF, or throw the whole thing away and start clean without hunting for a reset button first.

Guest mode is a real mode. The app tells you plainly that it is guest mode and that saved invoices will be waiting in history. It does not pretend otherwise and then lose them.

Why we built it rather than shipped it

Because we maintain it. Biller is not something we resell or white-label, it is a tool we needed for our own invoicing and then put a URL on. That means the people who wrote it are the people who get the bug report, and it also means the unglamorous work — the guest quota, the stamp area, the print stylesheet — gets done, because nobody is going to sell us on the value of any of it.

It is also the honest test of everything this Zlog claims. We write about deployment and keeping a site healthy. Biller is the proof, and it is a real service on a real domain with real invoices on it.

The best compliment a tool gets is that the user never thinks about it again.

If something in the workflow is wrong, tell us — it is a short list to work through, and the first ten are free.

Share this entry

← Back to all Zlog entries