Invoice Ninja is $12/mo (Ninja Pro). Billfold is a self-hosted alternative at $0.99/mo. Here's when each makes sense.
| Billfold | Invoice Ninja | |
|---|---|---|
| Hosting | Self-hosted, your infra | Open source, self-hostable with PHP, MySQL, and a web server |
| Data location | Your server, your disk | Your server (if self-hosted) |
| Free tier | 5 invoices/mo | Paid only |
| Pro pricing | $0.99/mo | $12/mo (Ninja Pro) |
| Dependencies | None (single binary + SQLite) | Docker, Postgres, etc. |
| Setup time | ~30 seconds | 15-30 minutes (self-host) |
| Dashboard | Built-in at /ui | Web UI |
| License | BSL 1.1 | Open source |
Billfold is a single Go binary with embedded SQLite. Install it with one command, and you are running in under a minute. Your data stays on your server.
curl -fsSL https://stockyard.dev/billfold/install.sh | sh
Teams evaluating Invoice Ninja alongside Billfold tend to split on two axes: feature depth and data residency. Invoice Ninja wins on feature depth — it is a mature product with integrations, mobile apps, and a dedicated support team. Billfold wins on residency — your invoice generator data lives on your server in a SQLite file you can inspect, back up, and migrate without asking anyone for permission.
Architecturally, Billfold and Invoice Ninja could not be more different. Invoice Ninja runs on distributed cloud infrastructure with load balancers, managed databases, CDNs, and redundancy across availability zones. Billfold is a single process writing to a single file on a single disk. That sounds fragile until you realize that SQLite handles more concurrent readers than most web applications will ever need, and WAL mode means reads never block writes.
Both Billfold and Invoice Ninja offer self-hosted options, but the operational requirements differ. Open source, self-hostable with PHP, MySQL, and a web server Billfold is a single binary with embedded SQLite — no containers, no external databases, no orchestration. The practical difference: Billfold runs on a $5 VPS with no configuration. Self-hosting Invoice Ninja typically requires a more substantial infrastructure investment.
Moving from Invoice Ninja does not have to be all-or-nothing. Some teams run Billfold for new data while keeping Invoice Ninja as a read-only archive of historical records. The API makes it straightforward to build a sync script if you need both systems to reflect the same data during a transition period.
Single binary. Free to start. $0.99/mo for Pro.