Why we don't charge per invoice: Billy's pricing, explained
€0 to start. €9 a month when you want to grow. €19 for teams. No invoice limits on paid tiers. This post explains why.
If you compare pricing across the sector, you'll notice something odd: almost every invoicing program limits how many invoices you can issue per month or per year in each tier. 60 invoices a year in Basic. 300 in Intermediate. 1,200 in Professional. 6,000 in "Enterprise".
This model has a very specific problem. It penalises you exactly when the software is working for you. The better things go, the more the software that helps you costs. It's the opposite of a reasonable alignment of incentives.
Why "charging per invoice" is broken
Picture yourself as a freelancer and the year is going well. You go from 40 invoices a year to 120. Congratulations. Under the tier-by-count model, your program automatically bumps you up. You might jump from €5/month to €30/month in a single step without changing how you work.
Worse: you hit 90 % of your quota mid-quarter. And then you start thinking things like:
- "This month I'll roll two invoices into one — save a slot." (Illegal in most cases — the Spanish Invoicing Regulation, RD 1619/2012, requires one invoice per operation.)
- "I'll issue this one outside the program and upload it once my year rolls over." (Breaks the VeriFactu chain.)
- "I'll migrate to another program before I hit the cap." (Waste of time, risk to data.)
None of these behaviours are the freelancer's fault. They're the rational response to a pricing model that penalises them for invoicing more.
The alternative: charge per team, not per volume
At Billy we've chosen a different model. Pricing is based on how many people use the system, not on how many invoices you issue. There's a simple reason for this: our real cost is the AI usage per person, not the number of invoices. An invoice costs Billy almost nothing. A user with the copilot open all day does.
The three plans:
Where's the catch? In the AI.
Anyone thinking carefully about the above will spot a detail: if we don't charge per invoice, where can costs run away from us? On the AI. Storing an invoice in the database costs us next to nothing. Every time the AI reads a supplier PDF, drafts an invoice, or answers a copilot question, there's a model provider billing us for it.
That's why the only limit you'll see published is AI usage per month: 200 scans/month on Pro, 500 on Max. The chat copilot is fair-use — there's no visible counter, but if someone uses it as a 24/7 leisure chatbot, we'll ask them to move to Max. It's fair on both sides.
It's the simplest policy possible: we charge where we have a real cost, we leave it open where we don't. The opposite — charging per invoice because charging for AI is "complicated" — is exactly the model we criticised at the start.
Why we're cheaper than the competition
Short answer: because we haven't added things we didn't want to. Our recurring costs are just two — AI infrastructure and email infrastructure — and nothing else. No office, no sales team, no payroll module to maintain, no debit card, no POS. Each of those things is a full product other platforms have added, and they have to amortise it by charging the base user more.
Our pitch is the opposite: the best invoicing program possible, no bloat. When you need payroll, use A3 or Sage. When you need a POS, use Ágora. We don't have to be your only tool; we have to be the one you use every day for your invoices.
What you won't find in our pricing
- No fake welcome discounts: none of that "50 % off for three months". That model teaches users to compare launch prices and leave when the promo ends.
- No lock-in: cancel any time from Settings, one click.
- No "let me send you a quote": the price is published. If it works for you, welcome. If it doesn't, that's fine.
"But is Billy sustainable at these prices?"
Fair question. Our maths: a Pro user costs us about €2–3/month in AI and email. At €9, it's profitable with enough margin to reinvest. A Team user at €19 with 10 people inside costs more but earns more absolute margin.
Pricing is calculated to be sustainable at the first user. We're not funding expansion with VC money to raise prices later. If it works at 100 users, it works at 10,000. If it doesn't work, we'll close honestly — not by raising prices — and either way, exporting all your invoices and your VeriFactu registry is a button that's always there: a ZIP with the PDFs and the JSON registry, yours, no paperwork.
Summary
- Charging per invoice is a broken model that penalises the freelancer's growth.
- Our pricing: €0 / €9 / €19 per month, no invoice limits on paid tiers.
- The real cost of a user for us is AI. We charge for that, not for what you issue.
- No fake discounts, no lock-in, no back-and-forth. Published price.
The Free plan works forever. When you need more, it's €9 a month.