Invoices don’t pay themselves.Someone has to ask.
29% of freelance invoices are paid at least a day late. Often it isn’t a bad client. The invoice just slipped down the inbox, and nobody followed up. duEmity is that follow-up, sent from your name. You’re not a beggar. You’re owed.
maya paid 6 days later, after one reminder
The cost of waiting
Waiting isthe expensive part.
Most late invoices aren’t about a difficult client. They just sit: in an inbox, in a queue, in the space between “I’ll follow up” and “it’s been six weeks.” Here’s what that wait costs, week by week:
“I’d rather do ten hours of extra work than send the ‘just following up’ email.” a freelancer, three invoices overdue
| Milestone | What’s really happening | The real cost |
|---|---|---|
| Day 0 | Invoice sent. You move on to real work, the way you’re supposed to. | $0 · done |
| Day 14 | Client genuinely meant to pay. It slipped. This is where most late invoices quietly sit. | 0 hours of yours |
| Day 30 | Now a reminder feels accusatory. So you wait. The awkwardness tax compounds daily. | ~2h of mental load |
| Day 60 | You finally write the email. It was fine all along. It always is. The delay was yours, not theirs. | 3 minutes, when you finally write it |
| Day 90 | Paid. Eventually. By a follow-up that should have happened six weeks earlier. | 0 awkward hours · closed |
Do the math
That timeline is yours.What is it costing you?
Rough numbers. Drag them until they match your life. The 29% is the industry average. Yours might be worse.
How it works
Set it up once.Then forget about it.
Three steps. About four minutes of your life.
Create the invoice
Add your client, the work, and the amount. duEmity numbers it for you (INV-0001, INV-0002, and so on) and marks the due date.
Send it and forget it
Hit send. duEmity starts the countdown the moment the invoice goes out. On Pro, it waits for the right moment and speaks up on its own.
The nudge goes out. You stay quiet.
The due date passes. A friendly reminder goes out in your name. You don’t lift a finger. The reminders only escalate if the invoice stays unpaid.
One invoice, end to end
Set it once.Watch it work.
Scroll. This is the whole job, played out on one invoice. You stay quiet the entire time.
“If it’s sorted, just ignore this.” — the friendly one
Invoice sent. Clock starts.
You hit send. duEmity numbers it, marks the due date, and starts watching. Nothing else happens — yet.
you: 90 secondsA friendly nudge, from you.
The first reminder assumes the best: “if it’s already sorted, just ignore this.” Most invoices pay right here.
you: 0 secondsStill polite. Now specific.
It names the invoice, the date, and the delay — before it becomes a problem for either of you.
you: 0 secondsThe final notice. Dated.
Clear date, clear ask, a paper trail behind it. Written from you — so you never have to be the heavy.
you: 0 secondsPaid. You didn’t say a word.
The money lands. The ledger closes in sage green. No drafts, no dreading your inbox, no awkwardness.
you: 0 awkward conversationsThe reminders
It reads like you.Not a collections agency.
Friendly on day 1, firmer as it escalates. Preview all three right here. This is exactly what your client would see:
The product
Everything onone sheet of paper.
The dashboard is one page: what’s outstanding, what’s overdue, and which invoice the chase is quietly working on. It reads like a printout, because it should.
Same page, live, behind “Open dashboard”. Paper and ink, because that’s the point: calm, readable, and it never nags you.
What it does
Six small things.All for one job: getting you paid.
A due date that watches itself
duEmity knows when every invoice is due. When a client goes quiet, it quietly starts counting the days.
Three human-sounding reminders
Friendly at day 1, firm at day 8, final at day 22. Tones you can preview and send with one click, written from your name and business.
Know what you’re owed
A dashboard that shows what’s outstanding, what’s overdue, and how long clients actually take to pay you.
Clean, printable invoices
A crisp, minimal invoice document your clients will actually want to look at. Print or save as PDF anytime.
A payment link in every nudge
Drop in your Stripe, PayPal or Wise link once. Every reminder carries it, so paying you takes one click.
A paper trail that protects you
Every invoice and reminder is logged with timestamps. When you need it, the evidence is already there.
Compared
The suites come with everything.You’ll open none of it.
The suites bundle proposals, contracts and a CRM you’ll rarely open. The enterprise tools are priced for finance departments. duEmity is one job, priced for one person. You.
| duEmity | Bonsai | HoneyBook | Paidnice | Chaser | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Starting price | $12/mo | $15/mo | $29/mo | $69/mo | $1,199/mo |
| Free plan | ✓ Forever | ✗ Trial only | ✗ Trial only | ✗ Trial only | ✗ |
| Built for | Solo freelancers | Solo + teams | Independent businesses | SMBs on Xero | Businesses & AR teams |
| The job | One thing, done well | Suite | Suite | AR tool | AR tool |
Prices and plan details from public pricing pages, August 2026. “Suite” means you pay for features you’ll likely never open.
You bill by invoice and chase it yourself. You’d rather swallow an unpaid amount than write the awkward follow-up. You want your name on every reminder, not some robot’s.
You have an accounts team. You want proposals, contracts, CRM and taxes in one suite. That’s Bonsai’s job. Or you genuinely don’t mind waiting three months to get paid. (Some people don’t. Fair enough.)
Pricing
One recovered invoice pays for years.
In a Freelancers Union study, freelancers hit by nonpayment lost nearly $6,000 in a year. duEmity costs less than a coffee a week.
- 3 invoices at a time
- 1 reminder per invoice
- Friendly & Firm tones
- Dashboard & payment stats
- Auto-reminders
- Final tone
- Custom invoice prefix & branding
- Unlimited invoices
- Unlimited reminders
- All three tones
- Auto-reminders, on schedule
- Custom invoice prefix & branding
- Email support, from a human
- Everything in Pro
- No subscription, ever
- Lifetime license
Prices in USD. Paying for duEmity goes through Stripe Checkout (cards, Apple Pay, Google Pay); processing fees apply according to Stripe’s rates for your country and payment method, and checkout runs in demo mode until Stripe is configured. Clients don’t pay through duEmity; they pay you directly, via the payment link in your reminders.
“A client loved the work. Six weeks later they still hadn’t paid. And I still hadn’t asked. The most expensive sentence in freelancing is ‘I’ll follow up on that.’ I built duEmity so I’d never have to say it again.”
The founder, after an invoice went quiet for six weeks
Word of mouth
The receipts.
Freelancers stopped writing the awkward email. Here’s what happened instead.
“I’d been “meaning to follow up” for three weeks. duEmity sent the nudge; the invoice paid the same afternoon.”
“The firm one is the one that works. Polite enough that my client replied “thanks for the reminder, on it” — and meant it.”
“I wrote the draft follow-up email eleven times and sent none of them. duEmity sent one. Paid within the week.”
“The final notice is what I could never bring myself to send. It did it without making me the bad guy.”
“Client loved the work, ghosted the invoice. Two reminders later, the money just… appeared. With a thank-you note.”
“I’ve sent exactly one awkward email in my life and I still cringe about it. duEmity sends dozens and none of them are awkward.”
Sample quotes until real customers arrive — the design is ready for them.
Referrals
Word of mouth,with a paper trail.
Every account has a referral link. When someone you refer upgrades to Pro, you earn 20% of their first payment. Tracked in Settings, no caps.
Share your link
It lives in Settings, one tap to copy. Send it to a freelancer who keeps chasing invoices. They’ll get it.
They sign up free
No card, no catch. The link quietly marks the account as yours.
They upgrade. You earn.
20% of their first payment: $2.40 on a monthly plan, $39.80 on a lifetime license. The ledger tracks every cent.
FAQ
The questions people ask.Answered straight.
Those are suites: proposals, contracts, CRM, tax tools. You pay for all of it even if you only need to get paid. duEmity does one thing: watches your invoices and follows up on them. It’s cheaper, faster to learn, and it doesn’t try to replace the tools you already use.
The reminders are written to sound like a person, not a collections agency. The first one assumes good faith: “if it’s sorted, just ignore this.” Escalation only happens gradually, and you stay in control of when each one goes out.
By the final reminder you’ll have a dated paper trail: every invoice, every reminder, every date. You can export it as a CSV from the dashboard whenever you need the history. Useful if you ever have to escalate.
Passwords are hashed with scrypt, sessions are server-side and expire, and there’s no analytics or tracking on the page. Your data (invoices, clients, settings) lives in a single JSON file on the server you run duEmity on, and it’s self-hostable with zero dependencies. Reminder emails go out through the email provider you configure (or are logged locally in demo mode). The only outside request the page makes is loading fonts from Google Fonts.
The free plan is free forever: three invoices, one reminder each. When an invoice pays for itself, upgrade to Pro.
Clients don’t pay through duEmity; they pay you directly. Add a payment link (Stripe, PayPal, Wise, or any URL) in Settings, and duEmity drops it into every reminder, so paying you takes one click. The money lands in your account, not ours. There’s also a one-time lifetime license if you’d rather never think about a subscription again.
The invoice follows up on itself
Go do the work.It’ll do the chasing.
Four minutes of setup. After that the reminders run themselves, signed with your name. Even if confrontation isn’t your thing.