Online invoicing service FreshBooks has launched an open API.
Freshbooks sees the new API allowing application designers, businesses, services companies, and users to integrate FreshBooks’ billing platform into a new category of products, features, and solutions for enhancing and streamlining productivity, workflow, sales, CRM, project management, and invoicing.
Possible uses of the API including adding to existing products to extend functionality, including timers, project planners, and desktop widgets. Sites with an existing sales infrastructure can use the API to add a billing component.
There are a lot of possibilities here and Freshbooks really has nothing to lose by offering an open API service. The API is an open invitation to innovation and should keep Freshbooks in could stead against competition including BillMyClients and Blinksale.
Previous Freshbooks coverage on TechCrunch coverage here.
You wrote “Facebooks really has nothing to lose” – you probably meant Freshbooks
Ahhh… it’s nice to see a Canadian web 2.0 company doing so well…
Best of luck to Mike and the rest of the team
Cheers,
Aidan Henry
http://www.MappingTheWeb.com
Can I just say what an amusing Freudian slip “Facebooks” is – commendable Duncan!
I love the ‘Facebooks’ slip-up. Was it accidentally on purpose!?
Fyi, clicking on the ‘add comment’ link in your feed takes about 20 seconds to load a page – not sure if it’s feedburner or Techcrunch that’s so slow, but you might want to look into it!!
The FreshBooks API has been around for well over a year. I think the shame about their pricing is that it is geared towards designers, consultants and professional services – based on the bands for client totals – as is the pricing for 37Signals products. Using it for a busy (but small) online store doesn’t seem to fit with their pricing.
David, Andreas
caught and guilty as charged, and now corrected
That sounds good, lemme checkit out
Hey folks – Mike from FreshBooks here.
Turns our Techcrunch outed us and our API release this morning! We were planning to launch the API – including new documentation, an API developer blog and a dedicated API forum around lunch. Since the word is out we have gone ahead and opened up that content now and will be adding new content throughout the day and long into the future. You can find it here:
http://develope...freshbooks.com/
Duncan: thanks for writing. It would be great it you could add a link to the developer area of the FreshBooks site in your post. Thanks!
I added a post about being outed here:
http://www.fres...a-platform-now/
Sounds like a great service; if you have multiple people working on the same stack of account receivables…
– Looks neat; I would rather do my invoicing – off line -
@Andy: I agree that some of the pricing models out there are not conducive to the type of business you are running. Without more detail, I’m not sure how many transactions you are doing or how much you have budgeted for tools to help run your store, but you should consider SimplifyThis.com, which has a $29/mo offer that lets you send up to 3000 invoices — sure to meet your needs. Check it out.
Just to be clear, FreshBooks is geared at organizations who have ongoing relationships with their customers – service providers like professional service firms and organizations with subscription based revenue models. You can read more about our philosophy on that here:
http://www.fres...vice-providers/
If significant interest emerges within our development community for different pricing models for the API, we will consider alternatives…but we’ll have to wait and see.
Not bad…But we really need better consumer bill management applications.
Hey David…not exactly certain I’m following you line of thinking, but FreshBooks is used by many businesses to bill consumers…it’s not just a business to business app.
No doubt freshbooks is a great application but I was looking for a free application just to get the feel of online invoicing and therefore I registered on http://www.invoicera.com/
Cheers
Dawson