Why the cap is monthly
A metered free tier is a sales mechanism, and a well-designed one. Understanding how it is set tells you when it will bite.
Nothing about an invoice is expensive at the vendor’s end. It is a page of text and a PDF. There is no video to stream, no bank feed to maintain, no per-message carrier fee. So the cap is not recovering a cost. It is set at the number that converts best — high enough that you set your business up inside the app, low enough that you hit it while you are busy and have your card in reach.
That is why it resets monthly rather than annually. A monthly reset guarantees the cap lands on your busiest week, and the busiest week is exactly when paying to remove it feels least optional. Service work is lumpy: five jobs finish in one week and none the next fortnight. Billing is lumpy for the same reason. A monthly counter is the one shape almost guaranteed to catch a real trade at the wrong moment.
The question worth asking instead
Cap size is the wrong comparison. Three against ten is a difference of degree, and both are chosen to be hit. The question that actually costs money is what happens to the invoices you have already sent when you stop paying.
This is not hypothetical. In our analysis of 5,443 invoicing app reviews, reviewers reporting lost previous invoices recur across five apps in the sample over more than seven years. A cap is an inconvenience on a Friday. A bill you cannot reproduce when a customer disputes it eight months later is a different category of problem, and it is the one nobody checks for before installing.
| Ask | Why it matters |
|---|---|
| What resets, and when | A monthly counter meets your busiest week. An annual allowance lets a heavy month borrow from a quiet one. |
| What happens to documents I have already sent | The expensive failure. If old invoices go read-only or disappear when you stop paying, the cap was never the real cost. |
| Can I get everything out | An export you can run today, without paying, is the only test that matters. Try it before you need it. |
| Whose name is on the document | Free tiers often pay for themselves with a line of vendor branding on the bill your customer opens. |
Where Invoice Tiger actually stands
There is no monthly counter in the app. Nothing tallies documents against a calendar, nothing resets on the first, and no screen tells you how many invoices you have left. Subscribed, you make and send as many invoices and estimates as the work requires.
The honest part, which belongs here rather than in the small print: without a subscription Invoice Tiger will not let you share a new draft at all. On that single axis it is stricter than an app that gives you three invoices a month. We are not claiming a more generous free tier, because we do not have one — what lifts the limit is $5.99 a month or $49.99 a year, and it is the only thing a subscription does.
What we do claim is narrower, and checkable:
- Nothing is held hostage. A document you have already sent stays shareable for good — subscribed or not. The bill from March is still a PDF you can send again in November.
- The export never sits behind the subscription. Every customer, document and saved service exports to a versioned JSON file, and imports back. That is available whether or not you are paying, so the door is not locked from the inside.
- Your records are on your phone. There is no account, no server and no web dashboard, so there is no account to lose access to. That also means the backup is your responsibility, which is precisely why the export exists.
- The document is yours. Your logo goes on the PDF. Invoice Tiger’s name does not appear anywhere on it, on any tier.
- Getting in is not a retyping exercise either. Your customers and your saved items import from a CSV, free, so switching does not start with an evening of copying out a client list. Past invoices import as read-only summary records where we can read the format — today that means Invoice Simple’s. What moves when you switch apps is the detail, including what does not.
That last point is the one worth generalising past this app. A tool that makes it easy to get your records out and hard to get anyone else’s in has chosen a side, and it is not yours. The question to ask of any invoicing app is whether your customer list can travel in both directions, because that is what decides how expensive it is to change your mind later.
When a metered app is the right answer anyway
If you send two invoices a month, a free tier that stops at three is genuinely free invoicing and nobody should talk you out of it. The arithmetic only turns when your billing is lumpy enough that the cap catches a real week, or when you have accumulated enough history that losing access to it would cost you an afternoon of reconstruction.
The same reasoning applies one level up. If what you need is bookkeeping rather than billing, an accounting platform is the right tool and its pricing will reflect that it is doing considerably more. Where that line falls is worth reading before you decide the category is the problem — and if percentage fees are what brought you here rather than caps, an invoice app that stays out of the payment covers the other half.
Sources
- Zoho — Zoho Invoice pricingA named, checkable example of a free plan measured per year rather than per month — up to 500 invoices annually, two users and three projects — and of vendor branding applied to documents on a free plan.