Ask HN: Slimvoice Alternative? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Slimvoice Alternative?

6 pointsepoca9 comments

Slimvoice is shutting down on April 1, 2023. Since 2016 Slimvoice has been my favorite site to create invoices, is there an alternative that keeps it simple and efficient to create invoices?

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Has anyone reached out to the author and asked if they'd be willing to toss a few things into a repo between now and April? I'm not asking for open-source maintenance, but it would be nice to self-host something Slimvoice-like on my own domain.

I'm curious how it's implemented--maybe https://weasyprint.org/ for the PDFs?

I think the author deleted herself / himself everywhere. I'd like to know if I could buy the service and leave it online.

If someone has contact to the author, I'd be pleased for some details.

It's ran by Sensor Station LLC, email seems to be `lookout@sensorstation.co`

Also this seems to explain why everything is gone (snippet from his site winduptoy.sensorstation.co):

> we go to great lengths to avoid being tracked, marketed to, and information being sold. we started using dumb-phones, deleted Google, social media, and SaaS accounts, and self-host whatever we need. we choose open source software whenever possible and max-out our ad blockers when on the web. we subscribe to zero subscription services.

Since Slimvoice removed the Google login for privacy reasons, I'm not surprised they've escalated their idea of living off the grid. Their ideals have left us out of their great service, and honestly it doesn't bother me but they should have at least left it self-host.

The loss of this tiny little product is so big! Can't imagine creating an invoice without slimvoice! Anybody aware of the reason? I would be happy to be a part of possible remedies!

Now I'll have to use Pages app again, I'm not going to pay a subscription service for invoices, it's ridiculous for someone who need makes 1 invoice per month.

I'd love to hear if anyone has other alternatives. I'm finding myself in a similar place as you do. I found on the About and Terms pages a few software projects listed, which the author claims are what powers Slimvoice:

  - https://www.blender.org
  - https://www.gimp.org
  - https://golang.org

General tech ^ and libraries:

  - https://github.com/aymerick/douceur
  - https://github.com/jung-kurt/gofpdf
  - https://github.com/lib/pq
  - https://github.com/qiangxue/fasthttp-routing
  - https://github.com/valyala/fasthttp
  - https://github.com/valyala/quicktemplate
  - https://github.com/bamiaux/rez
  - https://github.com/MithrilJS/mithril.js

And lastly, fonts:

  - https://github.com/rsms/inter
  - https://github.com/IBM/plex
  - https://github.com/weiweihuanghuang/Work-Sans

Aggregated from from:

  - https://slimvoice.co/about
  - https://slimvoice.co/terms

Copied URLs just in case those pages go kaput.

Too bad, it’s a great web-app. I wonder why not open-source it if the owner is not interested in keeping it up?

It does sometimes cost money and time to open-source something like this.

i.e. something that ran a business, and could run another (in time)

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