That’s really good PR.

I’m sure this product is fine, nothing against FreeAgent in particular, but I don’t like that almost all of the software apps discussed on Freelance Switch are subscription-based. For my invoicing, I’ve been using Microsoft Money Small Business. It has its flaws, but I think I paid $80 for it in early 2006. And that’s it. If it were $20 a month, I’d be at almost at $300 for the program and still paying.

Subscription-based software is simply a bad deal for a consumer.

@Henry. You are looking at SaaS through one narrow dimension. With a PROPER saas solution rather than Same Old Software As A Service you are paying for a ton of things that an out of the box solution does not deliver like: autoupgrade, maintenance, support, future proofing, no insallation costs, no hardware upgrade, no specific OS requirements. These are all costs that account for 85% of the true cost of running desktop/client-server applications. Don’t believe me then check what Gartner says and what Phil Wainewright talks about in this context. If that was not the case then you would not find the likes of customer advocate Vinnie Mirchandani banging on about the economics of the saas model compared with the usual delivery model. You’d also have to explain how Salesforce.com manages to sell $700 million of services a year, how NetSuite delivered blowout numbers last night, how Freshbooks manages to attract 275,000 users and Basecamp 1.25 million. These are real numbers about people who are cost conscious. But it’s about a lot more than a headline number.

In the case of FreeAgent, we’re providing a ’soup to nuts’ solution which doesn’t exist on the market in this form. We’re driving down the cost of compliance while providing users with the control they’ve never had over their finances. Check what people are saying at GetSatisfaction (http://www.getsatisfaction.com/freeagentcentral) or what our users are saying.

A billing system only provides a thin slice of that solution.

Now if you think I’m still blowing smoke then I invite you to trawl through my personal weblog which is aimed at professional accountants, the URL for which is shown above. I was a partner in a firm for 10 years so I know how it goes. See how I’ve consistently argued that online services provide a direct and tangible means by which professionals can remove themselves from the drudge of handling the record keeping while elevating their services that deliver added value. That has been a message I played for over a year before I got involved with the FreeAgent boys.
Also check how I’m a fierce advocate for customer value. When you take all the above and know I have a small investment in this company (the first software company I’ve ever taken an investment in by the way) and then parse that against how you see the world and still think that saas is poor value then there is little more I can say.

@Henry - I respect your position but saas is taking off in the SMB space rather than large customers. Perhaps I didn’t make the point terribly well. For me, software, whether delivered as a service or as a desktop app is all about value. Saas delivers value across a lot of metrics as I’ve outlined above with genuine cost reduction as a core advantage.

In regard to FreeAgent, I’d invite you to kick the tires which you can do for free and see for yourself what’s delivered. It is aimed at solo freelancers and was built by a couple of people who were tired of inadequate solutions. If you come back and so thanks but no thanks then fine. We can’t win ‘em all (and neither should we!!)

What I can say is that our customers are happy and believe we deliver value. The fact FreeAgent is a service doesn’t matter in that sense.

If you decide to give it a spin then I’d only ask that you think about one thing - does the control I get from FreeAgent make it worth the potential savings I could get from my professional accountant while I am also able to benefit from the real time information?

I’m going to sign up for this service and see how things go. It looks nice & functional for me, might be the perfect addition to my repertoire of useful websites.

- Dwayne Charrington.
http://www.dwaynecharrington.com

I signed up for a free account to give it a test run, and FreeAgent Central has a really nice, intuitive interface and just the right amount of features (a lot of the apps I come across are either too light or too heavy) — but I was turned off by the fact that you’ve got to add your bank account details, including account number and bank routing number, in order to generate invoices. They appear on the invoices, too, and there doesn’t appear to be any way to change that.

It may be that in the UK that’s a common practice but it isn’t here in the U.S., and I’m really not hot on having my bank information out there on display on every invoice I send. Right now I use Market Circle’s Billings2 and while I usually like web apps better than standalone system apps, I think I’ll stick with it in this case. It does a lot of the same things FreeAgent Central does, but is more privacy-friendly.