There are a few hundred products answering to customer billing and their feature lists are almost identical, which is why comparing them is so unsatisfying. The things that actually decide it are not on those lists. This page covers those instead.
Free, cheap and expensive — what you are actually paying for
The price differences in this market are real but they are rarely about billing, because issuing an invoice is not a hard problem and everybody can do it.
What you pay more for, roughly in order: more than one user, higher volume, stock and batch tracking, return preparation, e-invoicing and e-way bill integration, multi-branch, and support that answers. What you should never pay for is the ability to export your own records.
What "free" usually costs, where it costs something: a cap on volume, a watermark, a single login, your data held in a form you cannot get out, or a trial dressed up as a plan. The first three are honest limits. The fourth is not, and it is worth checking for specifically before you move a year of billing into anything.
Here the free plan is ₹0 with no card and no expiry, with limits on volume, one login and a watermark on the PDF — and full export on every plan, including that one.
Receivables: the report people buy billing software for
Ask a small business owner what they want from billing software and the answer is rarely about invoices. It is "I want to know who owes me money", and that is a report, not a document.
What produces it is every invoice with its payments applied, aged into buckets, grouped by customer. Then "what is overdue" is a screen rather than an afternoon, and a conversation with a customer has a number in it rather than an impression.
This is also the thing no file can do, however well built. A spreadsheet of invoices knows what you billed; the payments are in a bank statement somewhere else, and bringing the two together by hand is the work nobody does until it is urgent.
The report that matters most is not the total but the pattern. One customer who is always thirty days late is a terms problem rather than a chasing problem, and that is only visible when the history sits in one place.
What you get, free
- Complete GST tax invoices — every legally required field, tax split per line, not a template with a tax box.
- Customers stored once with GSTIN, address and state.
- Items stored once with HSN or SAC, rate and tax.
- Tax derived, not chosen — CGST and SGST or IGST, from the place of supply against your registration state.
- One numbering series, issued centrally, consecutive within the financial year.
- Stock that moves as you bill, so a closing figure means something.
- A receivables position — who owes what, aged, without adding anything up.
- PDF invoices to print, email or send on WhatsApp.
- Full export to CSV, Excel and JSON, on every plan including the free one.
- ₹0 — no card, no expiry, not a trial.
Getting started, properly, in about ten minutes
- Start free now — an email address and a password. No card, nothing to install.
- Enter your business name, address and GSTIN once. These are the fields you have been retyping.
- Add your items with their HSN or SAC codes and their own rates, or import the list from a spreadsheet.
- Add the customers you bill regularly, with GSTIN and state where they are registered.
- Set the number your invoice series should carry on from, so nothing restarts in the middle of a financial year.
- Raise a real invoice — the number, the tax split and the totals come filled in.
- Print it on your own printer and export everything, so you know both ends work.
Questions worth asking any vendor, including this one
Six questions, in the order of how much they cost you if you do not ask.
Can I export everything, in full, whenever I want, on the plan I am on? If export is a paid feature, your records are leverage. What happens to my data if I stop paying? "Locked" and "deleted" should both end the conversation. Who can see my data, and where is it stored? Can two people bill at once on one numbering series, and what does the second login cost? What happens when the internet drops at my counter? And what does this cost next year, after whatever the first-year price is?
None of these appear on a comparison table, and all of them are the reasons people change billing software eighteen months after choosing it.
For the record, on this product: export is on every plan including the free one, the free plan does not expire so records never become unreachable, billing needs a connection, and the paid plans are bought for a fixed term with no auto-renewal and no card kept on file.
The numbering series, which is where file-based billing fails
The rule is short: a consecutive serial number, unique within the financial year, not more than sixteen characters, using only letters, numbers, hyphens and slashes. One series, or clearly separated series where you genuinely need more than one, each consecutive in itself.
A file cannot enforce any part of that. The number is typed, so it can be repeated, skipped, or quietly rolled back when yesterday's invoice is edited into today's. Nothing notices, and the duplicate is found at return time rather than at billing time — a month after it happened, when the customer already holds their copy.
The forgotten half is cancellation. A cancelled invoice keeps its number and stays in the series as cancelled. Deleting the row and reusing the number leaves a gap in your books and a figure in your customer's, and reconciling those two is a long afternoon with a bad ending.
This is the most practical argument for a system over a file and it has nothing to do with features. It is the one thing a file structurally cannot do.
What a GST invoice legally has to carry
Rule 46 of the CGST Rules sets out what a tax invoice must show, and it is a longer list than most invoice templates carry. Getting one field wrong does not usually cost you anything the day you raise it — it costs your customer their input credit months later, which is a harder conversation.
The fields are:
- Your name, address and GSTIN
- A consecutive invoice number, unique within the financial year
- The date of issue
- The customer's name, address and GSTIN where they are registered
- Place of supply, and the state code, for inter-state supplies
- HSN or SAC against every line
- Description, quantity, unit, rate and taxable value per line
- Rate and amount of CGST, SGST/UTGST, IGST and cess, shown separately
- Whether tax is payable on reverse charge
- Signature or digital signature of the supplier or an authorised person
Billixo fills these in from the customer and product records rather than asking you to remember them, which is the only reliable way a busy counter gets them all right every time.
CGST, SGST and IGST — worked out, not chosen
Whether a sale attracts CGST and SGST or IGST is not a preference. It follows from the place of supply: same state as your registration means the tax splits into central and state halves, a different state means one integrated tax at the combined rate.
That sounds simple and goes wrong constantly, because it is a dropdown in most billing software and a dropdown is something a tired person clicks past. In Billixo the split is derived from the state on the customer record against the state on your registration, and it changes the moment either does.
The consequence of getting it wrong is real: an IGST invoice raised as CGST/SGST has to be credited and reissued, and if the return has already gone in, amended.
The AI, and what it is actually for
The useful application of AI to billing is not a chatbot. It is the twenty minutes a day spent retyping things that already exist on paper.
- Scan a supplier bill. Photograph it; the lines, the GSTIN, the tax and the totals come back as a draft you check rather than a form you fill.
- Find the HSN code. Describe the product in plain words and get a code to confirm, instead of scrolling a list of eleven thousand.
- Ask about your own numbers. "What is outstanding over sixty days?" answered from your data, not a manual.
- Write the reminder. A polite, specific chase for an overdue invoice, ready to send on WhatsApp.
Nothing is sent anywhere until you ask for it, and the platform runs on whichever model it has been configured with — including one hosted on your own server.
Where this fits in a working day
Morning: yesterday’s supplier bills get photographed and become purchase records. Through the day: invoices go out as goods do, shared on WhatsApp before the customer has left. End of the week: the receivables list says who to call. End of the month: the GST summary is a download, not a project.
None of that requires a new habit, which is the point. A billing system that needs discipline to work is one that stops working the first busy week.
What "free" means here, exactly
The Free plan costs nothing, needs no card, and has no expiry date. It is not a trial that turns into a bill; it is a plan you can run a small business on indefinitely.
What it gives you:
- Real GST invoices with the full Rule 46 field set
- Customers and products, with HSN/SAC held against each
- A daily and monthly invoice allowance, generous enough for a small operation
- One login
- Export of your own data, whenever you want it
What it does not give you:
- A watermark-free PDF
- GSTR-1 and GSTR-3B export
- The AI features — bill scanning, HSN lookup, the assistant
- Extra team logins, bulk import, recurring invoices and reminders
Every new account also gets the full paid feature set for its first 14 days, so you can see what the ceiling looks like before deciding whether you need it. When that ends nothing is charged and nothing is deleted — the account simply settles onto Free.
Start free now — it takes an email address and about a minute.
Where your data lives
On the server this platform is installed on. Every record carries a company identifier and every query is scoped to the signed-in account at the framework level, so one business cannot read another’s data by any route, including a crafted one.
Sign-in is rate limited, sessions can be restricted to one device per user, and passwords are stored hashed. Exports are available on every plan, free included: if you ever want to leave, your data leaves with you.
Frequently asked questions
Can two people use it at the same time?
On the paid plans, yes — separate logins against one shared numbering series, so two people cannot issue the same invoice number. That one requirement is what rules out spreadsheets for a business with two billers.
Does it work offline?
No. It runs in a browser and needs a connection to issue a bill. If your counter loses internet for long stretches, installed software is the better engineering choice and it is better to know that now.
Will it handle my GST returns?
It prepares and exports GSTR-1 and GSTR-3B figures on the paid plans, and reconciles purchases against GSTR-2B. Filing happens on the government portal — nothing here submits a return on your behalf.
Can more than one person use it?
On the paid plans, yes — team logins with their own credentials. The Free plan is a single login, which suits a one-person operation and is usually the first limit a growing business hits.
Is my data shared with anyone?
No. It sits in this installation, scoped to your company. AI requests only happen when you explicitly ask for one, and nothing is sent anywhere otherwise.
Try it — the demo is the product
There is no sales call and no scheduled demo, because a recorded walkthrough of somebody else’s data tells you nothing about your own. Open an account instead and raise a real invoice for a real customer; it takes about a minute and costs nothing.
Open the software demo → — sign in, or create a free account from the same screen.
See full details on the home page → — features, the AI, pricing and the answers to the usual questions.
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