Invoice creation and billing management tools for freelancers and small businesses to track payments and expenses. All available with one-click installation on 365i web hosting.
Bamboo Invoice is a free, open-source invoicing software designed to make it easy for freelancers an...
Invoice Ninja is a free, open-source software designed to help small businesses, freelancers, and en...
InvoicePlane is a free, open-source software designed specifically for managing invoices, quotes, pa...
Self-hosted invoicing software does the paperwork end of running a small business: quotes, invoices, recurring billing, expenses, payment links, and a client record to hang it all on. The appeal is obvious. Your customer list and your invoice history are the two most sensitive datasets a freelancer or a small firm holds, and self-hosting keeps both on infrastructure you control, with no per-user seat and no export policy that can change under you.
Set against that are FreeAgent, Xero, QuickBooks, Sage and Zoho Invoice. FreeAgent publishes £33 a month plus VAT for a limited company at standard rates, and gives the software away free to holders of a NatWest, Royal Bank of Scotland, Ulster Bank or Mettle business account. Those products are not just invoicing tools. They are bookkeeping systems that file to HMRC, and that difference is the whole story for a UK reader.
Which is where the honest caveat belongs, right at the top rather than buried. Making Tax Digital means VAT returns are filed through software that connects to HMRC's API, and none of the applications in this category do that. If you are VAT registered, a self-hosted invoicing app is a component of your bookkeeping, not a replacement for it. Read the operator notes below before you plan around it. Of the three applications listed here, Invoice Ninja and InvoicePlane are both current; Bamboo Invoice is not.
Situations we see often. If one of these sounds like you, this category is worth a look.
Not VAT registered, so the MTD for VAT question does not arise, and the tax return is a Self Assessment prepared once a year from records the invoicing app already holds. A self-hosted install covers quoting, invoicing and chasing at hosting cost, and the client list never leaves the contractor's own server.
Clients in the UK, the EU and the US, each expecting an invoice in their own currency with their own tax wording, which is exactly the case where cheap SaaS tiers start charging more. Invoice Ninja handles multi-currency and per-client tax rules without a plan upgrade, and the studio can put its own branding on the client portal.
Work starts as an estimate on site and becomes an invoice once the job is signed off, so retyping it is both wasted time and a source of pricing errors. Both current applications convert a quote to an invoice in one action and keep the two linked, which matters when a customer queries what they agreed to three months ago.
Billing needs to be driven by the application rather than typed by a human, so the requirement is an API and a database you can query directly. Invoice Ninja exposes a documented API and, self-hosted, the database sits on your own server next to whatever else you are running.
Making Tax Digital for VAT requires all VAT-registered businesses to keep records digitally and file their VAT Returns using software.
Read "using software" strictly. HMRC means software that submits through its own API, which is a specific technical capability a product either has or does not. An invoicing app that produces a beautiful PDF and a correct VAT total has not met the requirement, because filing is the bit being described. Plan for a filing route separately from the day one.
InvoicePlane is not a commercial product. It is developed in our free time, as a hobby.
Rare honesty from a software project, and worth taking at face value rather than as modesty. It sets your expectations for response times on a bug that affects your billing, and it tells you where the responsibility for backups, updates and testing an upgrade sits. That is a fair trade for free software; it is only a problem if you assumed otherwise.
Self-hosted invoicing apps are small and well-behaved technically, but they hold real money records and they need to be backed up properly. We back up the database and the document store together, daily, with thirty days of restore points, because finding a missing invoice from three weeks ago is a routine support request. We also run the outbound mail with proper authentication so the invoice itself reaches the customer, and we set the timezone correctly because tax filings are unforgiving.
Start with what is dead. Bamboo Invoice is not a candidate. Its own repository, under the original author's account, opens its description with "No longer maintained", and the code has not moved since 2021. It was a nicely built CodeIgniter application in its day. Installing it now means running unpatched PHP code that handles payment details.
Invoice Ninja is the serious option and the heavier one. Version 5 is a Laravel application requiring PHP 8.2 or newer, source-available under the Elastic License v2 rather than a conventional open source licence, with a paid annual licence to remove branding from client-facing pages. Expect it to want a cron entry, queue processing and a real mail configuration. InvoicePlane is lighter and sits happily on modest shared hosting, though its 1.6 documentation still caps PHP at 8.1, a branch PHP itself no longer supports.
Two things matter more here than elsewhere. Outbound mail must be authenticated properly, because an invoice in a spam folder is an unpaid invoice. And backups have to cover the database and the uploaded document store together, since restoring one without the other gives you invoice records pointing at files that are gone.
Not for you if you are VAT registered and hoped this would be your filing route. It cannot be. Neither application connects to HMRC.
Common questions we hear from people running invoicing systems applications on 365i hosting.
No. Making Tax Digital for VAT requires VAT returns to be submitted through software that connects to HMRC's API, and that capability has to go through HMRC's own recognition process. Neither Invoice Ninja nor InvoicePlane documents an HMRC connection. In practice, VAT-registered businesses run a self-hosted invoicing app for quoting, invoicing and payment chasing, then get the figures into recognised bookkeeping or bridging software for filing. Decide how that handover works before you commit, not afterwards.
Digital records, kept in compatible software, with digital links between the places data moves. HMRC is explicit that copying and pasting figures between programs does not count as a digital link, so exporting a spreadsheet from one system and typing the totals into another is the specific thing the rules were written to stop. Since April 2022 this applies to all VAT-registered businesses. Making Tax Digital for Income Tax began on 6 April 2026 for self-employment and property income above £50,000.
Invoice Ninja if you want capability and can live with a heavier Laravel application, InvoicePlane if you want something small that stays out of the way. Invoice Ninja gives multi-currency, an API, recurring invoices, expenses and a client portal, and its self-hosted branding removal is a paid annual licence. InvoicePlane covers quotes, invoices, payments and clients and little else. Bamboo Invoice is retired: the author's own repository describes it as no longer maintained, so treat it as a historical listing.
It is, provided you never store card numbers yourself, and these applications are built on that assumption. Both integrate with Stripe and PayPal, which means the customer enters their card details on the payment provider's page and your database only ever holds a transaction reference. That keeps you out of the hardest parts of PCI DSS. What you do hold is names, addresses, amounts and payment history, which is personal data under UK GDPR and needs the same care as anything else.
On the invoicing function alone, yes, and by a wide margin. On the whole job, often not. FreeAgent lists £33 a month plus VAT for a limited company and is free to holders of a NatWest, Royal Bank of Scotland, Ulster Bank or Mettle business account, and for that you get bank feeds, bookkeeping and MTD filing. A self-hosted app plus separate filing software plus your time can end up costing more. It wins when you are not VAT registered, or when data control is the point.
Very little, which is one of the pleasant things about this category. InvoicePlane runs fine on our entry web hosting plan. Invoice Ninja is a Laravel application and wants PHP 8.2 or newer, a cron entry and SSH access, all of which are available on every plan through the My365i control panel. Daily backups with 30 days of restore points are included as standard, and for financial records that is the feature worth caring about most. Business tier adds Timeline Backup Pro with 60-day database retention.
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All 3 invoicing systems applications available with one-click installation on our fast UK web hosting.
