People ask why the invoice kit costs $24 when a free spreadsheet does the same job. It mostly does. The difference is in the 31 hours around the formulas.
We log every hour we spend on a file, from the first sketch to the last support reply in its first month. Version 3.2 of the Studio Invoice Kit took 31 hours. That number sets the price, along with how many people we think will buy it.
Start with the hours
Design is the smallest part. Most of the time goes into testing: filling every field with real numbers, printing every page and opening each file in the oldest app version we support.
| Step | Hours | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Formulas and edge cases | 11 | 35% |
| Design and layout | 9 | 29% |
| Print tests on three sizes | 6 | 19% |
| The "Start here" guide | 5 | 16% |
What a buyer can check
A price is easier to trust when you can see what it pays for. So every product page lists the same three things, in the same order:
- The files you get, with names and sizes, before you pay.
- The version you're buying and when it last changed.
- What each license covers, in one sentence each.
If a formula breaks at row 400, a studio finds out in its busiest month.
Three licenses, three prices
Personal is the price of the hours. Team is roughly two and a half times that, because studios ask more questions and share files. Extended exists for people who build our files into products they sell, and it's priced so we can answer them the same day.
Refunds are part of the price
About one order in forty gets refunded. We build that into the price instead of into a form. You reply to your receipt and we send the money back the same day.
- No questions asked, though we read every reason
- License keys and links stop working for that file
- Nothing changes for anything else you own
What we'd change
We under-priced the first two versions and paid for it in support hours. If you sell files yourself, open pricing-worksheet.gsheet from the Ledgerline kit: it's the sheet we use, with our own numbers left in.