crater
by crater-invoice-inc
Crater is a self-hosted web app, with companion mobile apps, for creating invoices and estimates and tracking expenses and payments. It is aimed at individuals and small businesses who want to manage their billing on their own server.
- Stars
- 8.4k
- Licence
- AGPL-3.0
- Runs on
- A small server
- Setup
- Moderate
- Language
- PHP
- Age
- 2538 days
What you can do with it
- Create and send professional invoices and estimates to customers
- Track expenses and payments, and take card payments through Stripe
- Set up recurring invoices and give customers a portal to view their bills
Make money with it
An individual could offer setup, hosting and customisation of Crater as a managed invoicing service for local small businesses.
An idea, not financial advice. Check the licence before charging for anything built on it.
Ways a business could use it
- Replace a paid invoicing subscription by hosting your own invoicing and estimate system
- Speed up getting paid with recurring invoices, a customer portal and online card payments
Can you use it commercially?
Free to use. Anything you distribute that includes it must be open-sourced under the same licence. Running it as an online service also counts, so a hosted version must offer its source.
Not legal advice. Read the project's licence file before building a product on it.
Getting it running
It is a Laravel and Vue web app installed on a PHP web server or via a Docker image, with an installation wizard; the README links to the installation guide.
Follow the official instructions in the project README.
Things to check
- The README's roadmap is marked as struck through and copyright is 2022, so development may have slowed or stopped
- Licensed under AGPL-3.0, which requires sharing source changes if you offer it as a service
- Stripe payments need a Stripe account
- Roadmap lacks payment reminders and full accounting features
Who's talking about it
Checked 01 Nov 2026. Summary drafted by AI from the project's README.
