Replace a subscription · every price cited

The self-hosted Wave alternative

Invora: Self-hosted recurring invoicing for freelancers and small firms: every cycle lands as a draft you approve before it goes out, and each unpaid invoice carries your own payment link. Own it once, run it on your own server, and stop paying Wave every month.

Own Invora for $99 Try the live demo

Stop renting Wave.

Rented Wave Free (Starter) invoicing; Pro $19/mo ($190/yr) + payments/payroll add-ons; Wave Advisors from $149/mo ^[1] billed every month, for as long as you use it; your data in their cloud

Yours

Invora

$99 once · self-hosted · your data on your server

6 months of Wave costs what Invora costs once.

Buy once

How we counted: Free-with-paid-add-ons: core invoicing is free (Starter); Pro is $19/mo ($190 billed yearly) and the extras are separately priced - Receipts $11/mo on Starter or $8/mo on Pro, Payroll from $25/mo, card payments 2.9% + $0.60. A $9.50/mo first-three-months promo was live at the 2026-09-03 read; the regular price is cited.

How Wave pricing grows

Wave charges a flat monthly subscription per business rather than per seat, with extras like payroll and bookkeeping sold as separate add-ons.

“The subscription fee for the Pro Plan is per business, not per owner.”, their own page, read 2026-08-11

What Wave does that we don't

Wave offers live-person support through chat or email during business hours.

“Our support team is available through live chat or email Monday to Friday from 9 AM to 4:45 PM Eastern.”, their own page

Who should stay with Wave

If you need built-in online card payment collection instead of recording payments manually, stay with Wave — Invora records payments manually and has no built-in online card payment collection.

What Invora deliberately doesn't do is on its product page.

Why owning beats renting Wave.

One payment

No monthly, per-seat or per-location fees. The license is perpetual.

Your data stays on your server

It never lives in Wave's cloud.

No plan ceilings

Records and users are limited by your hosting, not by a pricing tier.

It keeps working if the vendor doesn't

Self-hosted software can't be sunset or repriced out from under you.

The fair trade-offs: you host it, back it up and apply updates yourself. See the product page for its limits, and the full Invora vs renting comparison.

Questions about moving off Wave.

Does Invora support recurring invoices?

Yes — weekly, every two weeks, monthly, quarterly or yearly schedules. Each cycle generates a draft for your review, and nothing is sent until you press Send.

Does it email invoices automatically?

It emails an invoice when you press Send — through your own SMTP server, with the client's public link and your payment link. Since 3.2 it can also send payment reminders on a schedule you approve once: off until you switch it on, with a preview of exactly what would go out today, stopping when the invoice is paid, and paused per invoice or per client. Every attempt is recorded in a send log.

Can it collect online payments?

Invora never touches a card. Paste your own Stripe Payment Link, PayPal.me or bank page and it becomes a Pay button on the client's invoice; you record the payment when it lands. Nothing to PCI-certify, nothing to breach.

What do I need to run it?

PHP 8.1+ with PDO and MySQL/MariaDB or SQLite, on Apache/LiteSpeed (mod_rewrite) or Nginx/VPS.

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Sources

Wave: price checked 2026-09-03, source“Pro $19 USD/month”

Competitor prices change, so always confirm on the linked page. We only print figures we could verify on the date shown. This vendor is tracked in the Price Observatory: every figure verbatim, dated, re-checked quarterly.

Replace Wave with Invora.

Open the live demo first; it costs nothing.

See Invora Invora vs renting All alternatives