Invora — Invoicing & Billing System (PHP + MySQL, Self-Hosted)
Self-hosted invoicing you own — no monthly fee, no per-invoice cut.
The problem it solves
Freelancers, consultants, and small businesses that invoice clients are stuck paying a hosted invoicing tool a monthly fee forever, and that tool keeps their client and revenue data. Cheap invoice scripts often get the numbers subtly wrong too — floating-point drift, discounts and tax applied in the wrong order, and manual status juggling to work out what's paid, partial, or overdue.
- Monthly SaaS fees that never stop
- Client and revenue data living on someone else's server
- Invoice math you can't verify yourself
What you get
Provable money math
Integer-cents arithmetic with per-line tax rates and proportional discounts, plus automatic paid/partial/overdue status derived from recorded payments and the due date.
Live line-item editor
Totals update as you type, pulling from your saved item catalog.
Estimates to invoice in one click
Convert a quote or estimate straight into an invoice.
Branded PDF & public link
Print-perfect branded PDF invoices plus a read-only public client link that needs no login.
Dashboard & collection chart
See invoiced, collected, outstanding, and overdue totals alongside a 6-month collected chart.
Reusable clients & item catalog
Saved clients and items with default tax rates, auto-numbering, and one-click demo data.
Installable mobile app (PWA)
Add it to a phone or tablet home screen straight from the browser — a full-screen app served from your own server, with no app store involved. Business data is never cached offline, so what you see is always live.
Own It 2.0 — API, 2FA, backups, dark mode
Invora 2.0 adds the 2.0 owner layer. Upgrade by replacing the files — the database migrates itself, and it is still the same one-time purchase.
- REST API with an OpenAPI spec and signed webhooks
- Two-factor sign-in (TOTP)
- Email notifications through your own SMTP
- CSV import with a mandatory dry run
- One-click backups
- Dark mode
Own It 3.0 — works for your AI, not just for you
Point Claude, an n8n agent or your own script at POST /mcp and it can list and create invoices and estimates, record payments and pull the overdue report — under the same key, roles and integer-cent money engine you use. There is deliberately no send tool and no delete tool: mail and destruction stay human clicks. Recurring invoices arrive as drafts for review, never as sent mail.
- Roles with email invitations and a last-admin guard
- Append-only audit trail across browser, API and agent
- Printable PDFs
- Your logo and colours throughout
- Scheduled backups with a guided dry-run restore
- Optional single sign-on (OIDC)
Pricing — one-time, yours forever
- ✔ Full source included — PHP you can read and change
- ✔ No subscription. One payment, yours forever
- ✔ It never phones home
- ✔ Your data stays on your server
No reviews yet — so here is what we offer instead. Every competitor price on our comparison pages is source-linked and dated, and when a vendor’s price won’t load we say so rather than guess. See the sources for yourself →
Screenshots
Honest limitations
- No recurring or subscription billing
- No built-in online card payment collection — payments are recorded manually
- Not full double-entry accounting or an ERP
- No automated invoice email sending (branded PDF + public client link instead)
2-minute web installer, plain PHP 8 + MySQL (or SQLite for a trial), no Composer or build step — Docker image included.
Covered in these guides
The honest walkthrough: what self-hosting actually requires, what the 2-minute web installer does, and what you are (and are not) signing up to maintain.
Data ownership explained for non-technical owners: where records physically live, what export and backup look like, and the honest responsibilities that come with control.
Spreadsheets are genuinely fine — until specific failure modes appear. The honest thresholds for moving to a real tool, and which category to look at when you cross one.
The complete walkthrough for non-developers: what shared hosting is, the six-step install every product here uses, a try-it-locally path, and honest fixes for the three things that actually go wrong.
The honest case for a one-time, self-hosted invoicing tool over monthly SaaS — with today's competitor prices, verified and dated, and the free options named first.
Frequently asked questions
Does Invora support recurring invoices?
Not in 1.0 — each invoice is created individually, or one-click duplicated.
Does it email invoices automatically?
It produces a branded print/PDF invoice and a read-only public client link; automated email sending is on the roadmap.
Can it collect online payments?
No — you record payments manually; built-in payment gateways are roadmap.
What do I need to run it?
PHP 8.0+ with PDO and MySQL/MariaDB or SQLite, on Apache/LiteSpeed (mod_rewrite) or Nginx/VPS.
What if the developer disappears?
You get the full source code and your data stays in one database you own — nothing phones home.