Invoice Ninja
Hosting
Install Invoice Ninja in one click on our fast, reliable UK web hosting. Fully managed with free SSL, daily backups, and dedicated expert support.
What is Invoice Ninja?
Invoice Ninja is a modern, open-source invoicing platform built on Laravel and Vue.js. It covers quotes, invoices, recurring billing, online payments through 50+ gateways, time tracking, expenses, projects, tasks and a self-service client portal where customers can view invoices and pay online.
The free, self-hosted version gives you the full feature set with no client or invoice limits. A paid SaaS version exists for users who don\'t want to run their own server, but the self-hosted edition is functionally complete. Active development happens on GitHub with regular releases, security patches and an engaged community.
Invoice Ninja suits freelancers, agencies, consultants, small service firms and anyone who currently uses spreadsheets, Word templates or expensive SaaS to invoice clients. The interface is genuinely modern, the client portal is professional, and the integration list (Stripe, PayPal, GoCardless, Authorize.net, Square, Mollie and many more) covers most UK and international payment workflows.
365i’s editorial review of Invoice Ninja
Invoice Ninja is the self-hosted invoicing platform I most often recommend to freelancers and small agencies, and I've installed it for myself, for clients and for friends in business plenty of times. It's the rare combination of genuinely modern UI, full open-source code, a free tier with no artificial limits, and a feature set that competes with paid SaaS products at a fraction of the cost.
Most freelancers and small firms I see are paying somewhere between £15 and £50 a month for invoicing across QuickBooks, FreshBooks, Xero or similar. That's £180 to £600 a year forever. Invoice Ninja self-hosted on our £5.99 plan is £71.88 a year and you get the entire feature set. Over five years that's a difference of £540 to £2,640. For a freelancer just starting out, that matters.
"In over 20 years of hosting, I've watched dozens of small businesses overspend on SaaS for things they could comfortably self-host. Invoice Ninja is the textbook example. The free tier isn't a stripped-down trial, it's the complete product, and the upside of owning your invoicing data in your own database is much bigger than people assume."
Mark McNeece, Founder, 365i Hosting
The features that matter most in practice. Recurring invoices with automatic billing through Stripe or GoCardless work brilliantly for retainer clients. Quotes that convert to invoices with one click save genuine admin time. The client portal is something I've had several clients comment on positively, with PDF download, online payment and a credit-card-on-file option for trusted customers. Multi-currency works correctly, and UK VAT handling, including reverse-charge for EU B2B, is properly built in.
On hosting, Invoice Ninja is a Laravel application with the usual requirements: PHP 8.1+, MySQL 5.7+ or PostgreSQL, and a few standard extensions (BCMath, Ctype, Fileinfo, JSON, Mbstring, OpenSSL, PDO, Tokenizer, XML, GD or Imagick). All of those are on our standard stack. The one-click installer takes care of the deployment, runs the database migrations and gets you to the welcome screen in under a minute.
Where I'd suggest care is on email deliverability. Invoice Ninja sends transactional email for invoices, payment receipts and reminders, and you really don't want those landing in spam folders. Either configure SMTP through a transactional email service (Brevo, Postmark, SendGrid, Mailgun) or use our included email with proper SPF, DKIM and DMARC records. We help you set those up as standard, but the responsibility for getting it right matters because nothing kills a client relationship faster than an invoice they didn't receive.
For most freelancers and agencies, Invoice Ninja on our £5.99 shared plan does the job for years. If you scale to a 50-person agency with thousands of monthly invoices and complex reporting, you'll outgrow it eventually, but most users never get there. The fact that the free self-hosted edition is the full product, not a hobbled trial, is what makes it special.
Why Host Invoice Ninja with 365i?
Our web hosting is built for PHP applications like Invoice Ninja. Every plan includes everything you need to launch and grow.
One-Click Installation
Install Invoice Ninja with a single click from your control panel. No manual configuration, no FTP uploads, no database setup.
Free SSL Certificate
Every site gets a free SSL certificate, automatically configured and renewed. Keep your Invoice Ninja installation secure from day one.
99.9%+ Uptime Track Record
Enterprise-grade data centres in the UK, US & Asia with redundant power, cooling, and network connectivity. Shared hosting runs on autoscaling cloud infrastructure with a 99.9%+ historical uptime record; Managed Cloud Servers target 99.99% uptime; our VPS products carry a contractual 99.99% network availability SLA with service credits.
Daily Backups
Automatic daily backups with easy one-click restore. Your Invoice Ninja data is always safe and recoverable.
7-Day Expert Support
UK-based hosting specialists available 7 days a week including evenings, weekends, and bank holidays. Real people, real help.
SSD Storage
All plans run on fast SSD storage for snappy page loads and responsive admin panels. Invoice Ninja performs at its best.
Where Invoice Ninja Fits
Best for
Freelancers, consultants, agencies, small service firms and contractors who currently invoice through spreadsheets, Word templates or paid SaaS like FreshBooks or QuickBooks. Particularly suited to anyone billing 5-500 clients a month who wants modern features (recurring invoices, online payment, client portal, time tracking) without the £15-£50/month SaaS subscription cost. Multi-currency and EU/UK VAT handling are properly built in.
Watch for
Invoice Ninja is full accounting only at the most basic level. For double-entry bookkeeping, deep UK VAT MTD filing, payroll or detailed financial reporting you'll still need Xero, QuickBooks or your accountant's software. Email deliverability for invoices needs proper SMTP setup, SPF, DKIM and DMARC, otherwise invoices may land in spam. Some advanced features in the SaaS version (white-labelled client portal subdomains, certain integrations) require the paid Pro tier.
Web Hosting for Invoice Ninja
Get Invoice Ninja up and running in minutes with our fast, reliable web hosting. Every plan includes one-click installation, free SSL, UK, US & Asia data centres, and dedicated expert support.
- 1 website
- 10 GB SSD storage
- Free SSL certificate
- 80+ 1-click installs
- Unlimited LVE resources
- Autoscaling cloud platform
- UK, US & Asia data centres
- 5 websites
- Unlimited SSD storage
- Free SSL certificate
- 80+ 1-click installs
- CDN included
-
Timeline Backup/Restore
Timeline Backup
- Website files and databases
- Daily snapshots, 30-day retention
- One-click file and database restore
- Everything above, plus email mailbox backups
- 60-day database retention
- Mailbox restore (to a temporary mailbox first, then sync back)
- Unlimited LVE resources
- Autoscaling cloud platform
- UK, US & Asia data centres
- 10 websites
- Unlimited SSD storage
- Free SSL certificate
- 80+ 1-click installs
- CDN included
-
Timeline Backup/Restore (Pro)
Timeline Backup
- Website files and databases
- Daily snapshots, 30-day retention
- One-click file and database restore
- Everything above, plus email mailbox backups
- 60-day database retention
- Mailbox restore (to a temporary mailbox first, then sync back)
- Unlimited LVE resources
- Autoscaling cloud platform
- UK, US & Asia data centres
All prices exclude VAT. No contract, cancel any time.
Need More Power for Invoice Ninja?
For high-traffic sites, large catalogues, or mission-critical deployments, our fully managed cloud servers give Invoice Ninja dedicated resources and enterprise-grade performance.
- Dedicated CPU, RAM & SSD storage
- 99.99% uptime
- Fully managed by our team
- Choose 365i, AWS, or Google Cloud
Servers
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An Invoice Ninja case from our books
A UK marketing consultancy with five staff came to us in 2024 paying £42 a month for a SaaS invoicing platform plus a separate £18/month time-tracking tool. They invoiced around 35 clients monthly, several on retainers, and were spending roughly two hours a week on admin chasing late invoices and reconciling payments. They wanted lower cost and integrated time tracking.
We installed Invoice Ninja on the £5.99 shared plan, set up Stripe and GoCardless, configured SMTP through their existing Microsoft 365 with SPF/DKIM/DMARC, and helped them migrate their client list and outstanding invoices over a weekend. We also helped configure recurring invoices for their seven retainer clients, which had previously been raised manually each month. Twelve months on, their hosting cost was £71.88, replacing £720 of SaaS spend (a £648 saving). The recurring-invoice automation alone saved them around 20 minutes per retainer client per month, which they reckoned was worth more than the cost saving.
What we would tell anyone in the same spot: don't only count the licence saving. Count the time saved by automating things you used to do by hand.
Anonymised at the client's request. Industry, scale, and timeline preserved.
What we look for in invoicing systems hosting
Self-hosted invoicing apps are small and well-behaved technically, but they hold real money records and they need to be backed up properly. We back up the database and the document store together, daily, with thirty days of restore points, because finding a missing invoice from three weeks ago is a routine support request. We also run the outbound mail with proper authentication so the invoice itself reaches the customer, and we set the timezone correctly because tax filings are unforgiving.
More applications you can install on 365i hosting
Beyond Invoicing Systems, our one-click installer covers 79 open-source PHP applications across 27 categories. A small selection from across the catalogue:
Invoice Ninja Hosting FAQ
Common questions we hear from people running Invoice Ninja on our hosting.
Yes. The self-hosted edition is fully open source and has no client limits, invoice limits or feature locks. The paid SaaS version exists for people who don't want to run their own server, and the paid Pro tier adds white-labelling and a few advanced features, but the self-hosted free tier is functionally complete for the vast majority of freelancers, consultants and small agencies. We host the free self-hosted version on our standard plans from £5.99 a month.
Yes. Invoice Ninja is in our one-click installer. You choose your domain or subdomain, set the admin user and the database, and it deploys with the Laravel migrations run automatically. The whole process takes under a minute, after which you log in and start configuring your company details, tax rates and payment gateways.
Yes. UK VAT rates are configurable per product or per invoice, and the system handles standard, reduced, zero-rated and exempt categories properly. For B2B EU sales with reverse-charge, you can mark the customer as reverse-charge and the invoice automatically shows the correct legend. UK VAT-exempt sales (educational, financial services etc.) are also supported. For Making Tax Digital filing to HMRC, you would export the VAT report and submit through bridging software, since direct MTD filing isn't built in.
Invoice Ninja supports 50+ payment gateways out of the box. Stripe and PayPal are the most popular and work without any extra setup beyond pasting in your API keys. GoCardless is excellent for UK direct-debit recurring billing. Authorize.net, Square, Mollie, Worldpay and many others are also supported. Configure the gateway in admin, link it to your invoice templates, and customers can pay directly from the email or the client portal with one click. Payments mark the invoice paid automatically.
This is the most important practical detail. Invoice Ninja sends invoice emails on your behalf, and without proper authentication those emails can land in spam. The fix is to set up SPF, DKIM and DMARC records for your domain (we help with this as standard), and ideally route mail through a transactional email service like Brevo, Postmark, SendGrid or Mailgun rather than relying on the default PHP mail function. Once configured properly, deliverability is excellent. Don't skip this step. A lost invoice is a delayed payment.
Ready to Host Invoice Ninja?
Get started with Invoice Ninja on our fast UK web hosting. One-click installation, free SSL, and dedicated expert support included.