Why Alex Goldwyn built BillingHub around per-invoice pricing
Alex Goldwyn is the founder of BillingHub, invoicing software for freelancers and small businesses that charges per invoice rather than by monthly subscription. The conversation traces the product’s early launch, the search for first users, and the assumptions about onboarding and marketing that had to change.
Talk to people with the problem before building, and measure whether they take meaningful actions rather than relying on impressions or likes. Alex Goldwyn’s experience also shows how identifying the right audience can matter more than repeatedly revising a landing page.
What’s the short story of how your business started, and what makes it genuinely different from the other options your customers have?
I kept seeing freelancers and small businesses who send a few invoices a month and still pay a monthly subscription for a tool they barely use. I compared the prices of 22 paid invoicing plans, and the median plan only becomes cheaper than $1 per invoice at 38 invoices a month. So with BillingHub you pay for each invoice you issue, not for the month. The second difference: the client pays the invoice by card from a button in the email, the money goes through the seller’s own Stripe account, and we take no cut of the payment. I launched the product in July 2026 on my own, without investors.
How did you win your first customers, and where does most of your new business come from today?
Honestly, I’m at the very beginning. The first sign-ups came from startup directories, mostly BetaList, and from Threads, where I post practical tips about invoicing. I also tried paid ads on X and Reddit, but they brought zero sign-ups. Now I’m betting on things that take longer but last: useful pages and guides about invoicing, comments for journalists, and talking to people where they already discuss their problem.
What’s one decision that changed the direction of your business, and one mistake that taught you the most?
The decision: I removed a wall of eight screens a new user had to get through before reaching the product. Six of the eight steps can now be skipped, and I stopped asking for a date of birth altogether. In the month before that, only one person signed up, and they never made it to the end.
The mistake: I thought that if people weren’t signing up, the pages were to blame, so I kept reworking them. Paid ads showed that almost everyone left after the first page, whichever page they landed on. The problem was who I was bringing in, not the pages.
What has changed in your industry or in what your customers expect over the last couple of years, and how have you adapted?
People are tired of subscriptions. Everyone already has a dozen, and one more monthly fee for a tool they need a couple of times a month is annoying. Second, clients expect to pay an invoice by card right away instead of making a bank transfer. I built the product around those two things: paying per invoice, and a pay button in the email. The third change is about me: AI made it possible for one person to build and run a product for about $110 a month.
If you were advising someone starting out in your industry today, what would you tell them to do first, and what would you tell them to ignore?
First find people who have the problem and talk to them, and only then write code. I did it the other way around, and the product was ready before I had a way to show it to anyone. Ignore metrics that feel good but mean nothing: impressions, likes, average position in search. Only look at whether a person took an action.
Thank you to Alex Goldwyn and the team at BillingHub for sharing what actually worked with Leaders Perception readers.
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