Short answer: yes, with strings. Here is what the free tiers actually cost you, and what is genuinely free with no catch.
6 October 2026 · 6 min read
"Free invoicing app" is one of the most searched phrases in UK trade software, and the honest answer is that free versions exist but almost always trade the money for something else. Worth knowing what, before you build your business admin on one.
The common limits are a cap on invoices per month, someone else’s branding on the document you hand your customer, no VAT or CIS handling, no chasing of late payers, and your data living somewhere you cannot easily export from. None of these matter on invoice number three. All of them matter on invoice number thirty.
Even on a free plan, taking card payment costs — typically around 1.5% plus a fixed fee per transaction, sometimes considerably more. A "free" app that charges 2.9% on a £2,000 job has taken £58 from that one invoice. Bank transfer remains the genuinely free route, which is why your sort code and account number belong on every invoice you send.
We publish a set of tools that cost nothing and ask for nothing: a free UK invoice template, a VAT invoice template, and calculators for VAT, CIS deductions, HMRC mileage, late payment interest and your hourly rate. Use them whether or not you ever pay us anything.
If you send two or three invoices a month, a template and a bit of discipline is a perfectly sensible system, and anyone telling you otherwise is selling something. The point at which it stops working is usually when you lose track of which invoices have been paid — that is a tracking problem, and templates do not solve tracking.
GraftG is £14 a month on Solo with a 14-day free trial, which collects a card at sign-up and can be cancelled before it ends. It is not free because reading receipts, generating PDFs and chasing payers costs us money on every message. What you get for it is the invoice going out the day the job finishes rather than the following Sunday. There is a wider comparison in the best invoicing app for tradies.
There are free tiers, but they typically limit how many invoices you can send, put their own branding on your document, or leave out VAT, CIS and payment chasing. Genuinely free and unlimited with no branding is rare, and card payment processing is charged separately regardless.
A free invoice template plus bank transfer costs nothing at all. Put your sort code, account number and a unique invoice number on every one, and keep a simple record of what has been paid. It works well at a few invoices a month.
No, but there is a 14-day free trial on the Solo plan, and the invoice templates and calculators on this site are free to use permanently with no account. The trial takes a card at sign-up and can be cancelled any time before it ends.
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