Show HN: Momentum – Project Management and Invoicing for Freelancers

I see so many of these freelancer-oriented project management and time tracking/invoicing tools announced. Sincere question: what freelancers need things like this?

I have worked as a solo freelancer (programming and systems admin) for about 15 years. My experience:

- As a solo freelancer I can only juggle so many clients and projects at once. I don't struggle to keep track of the projects or billing because I only have a few.

- I usually keep my customers long-term, multiple years, even a decade. That means I don't constantly have to look for new projects, and it also means I have established trust with my customers.

- Because of trust I don't experience no-pay or slow-pay. I have never had an unpaid invoice, and only a few times had a slow-pay customer. I don't have a lot of invoices out there waiting for payment so I don't need a system to track them.

- I try to avoid billing for time, moving my customers to pay for defined deliverables or monthly retainers. I rarely do big fixed-price projects because that requires a skill I and my customers don't have: the ability to predict the future.

- I don't put myself in a position where my customer can owe me a ruinous amount of money, or where I owe the customer a ruinous amount of work. Another reason I don't do big fixed-price projects.

- I charge in 30-minute increments, so I don't need split-second time tracking. A simple spreadsheet will do.

- My customers usually have a freelancing contract they paid their lawyers to prepare, but in case they don't I have a short template. Since 95% of what goes into such contracts gets covered by law anyway I focus on accurately describing the deliverables, the schedule, the amount owed and when, who owns what, and whether disputes go to arbitration or not.

- The freelancers I know who do juggle a lot of projects and customers (churning for new projects constantly) use piecework platforms like Upwork and Fiverr, which have time tracking and invoicing/payments built-in to the platform. I don't use those, too much race to the bottom.

- About half of my customers have their own time or deliverable tracking system and sometimes an invoicing system or template that they ask me to use.

If tools like this one (Momentum) address a real need then good luck. To me it looks like friction at best, and entrepreneur cosplay at worst. By cosplay I mean the freelancers who don't have customers or any good way to get customers who setup LLCs and business bank accounts, fancy web sites, LinkedIn marketing campaigns, and elaborate processes and billing systems -- all overhead costs and non-billable time. As a freelancer you want to reduce non-billable time as much as possible, and adding more process and tools may not accomplish that.