Indy Assessment – The Good and Unhealthy for 2023

Should you’re a freelancer uninterested in messy workflows, late funds, and juggling a number of instruments, Indy is an answer along with your wants in thoughts. This mission and consumer relationship administration software program has nearly all the pieces you might want to streamline the best way you’re employed, from gathering leads and delivering proposals, to staying on prime of contracts, invoices, and the precise work you’re doing.

Maintain studying to be taught extra about what we love (and don’t love) concerning the Indy platform.

Indy In comparison with the Greatest Venture Administration Software program for Freelancers

To write down this evaluation, we researched, examined, and vetted dozens of normal mission administration instruments. From there, we narrowed them all the way down to the most effective choices which can be tailor-made particularly for freelancers. Whereas Indy is a good choice and one among our favorites, it solves a really particular downside for a particular viewers.

Right here’s a fast have a look at another choices to contemplate and while you would possibly wish to use them.

Monday.com is centered round databases, making it potential to trace absolutely anything from invoices, duties, and purchasers to stock, leads, and extra in a single place. You possibly can join a free trial right now or use it without cost endlessly.

ClickUp is a scalable and feature-rich mission administration resolution with a ton of collaboration options, together with real-time doc enhancing and built-in chat. Check-drive ClickUp’s entry-level plan without cost to see if it’s best for you.

Teamwork was made particularly for service and client-based companies, however focuses on scalability so you may convey on extra group members and unlock extra options as you want them. Attempt it out without cost for 30 days.

There’s a typical theme amongst our options above—they’re not constructed for groups of 1.

Due to that, they’ll really feel convoluted and will overwhelm you with options you don’t care about. Should you’re searching for a easy, lean, and streamlined resolution that features freelance-specific options, Indy is a good alternative.

Indy: The Good and the Unhealthy

Relating to mission instruments constructed for freelancers, there aren’t many choices on the market. Indy positively helps bridge the hole between normal mission administration software program that’s constructed for groups and the wants of solo staff. It has quite a bit going for it, but it surely’s not good (but).

What Indy Is Good At

Constructed for freelancers: Indy is the all-in-one digital workspace for freelancers looking for a straightforward approach to wrangle the chaos of working a one-person operation. In contrast to clunky mission administration instruments designed for complete groups, all the pieces within the Indy platform is crafted for managing the each day grind of solo mission work. From producing proposals to invoicing purchasers and all the pieces in between, Indy handles all of it in an intuitive interface that simplifies your workflow quite than complicating it.

Better of all, Indy provides a free plan so you may hit the bottom working for free of charge. You’ll have entry to useful instruments like contract templates, an bill generator, and a timer to trace your billable hours. Indy additionally gives a library of free video programs overlaying important freelance expertise, together with advertising and marketing oneself, negotiating phrases and contracts, and rather more. Whether or not you select to improve to their inexpensive paid plan or not, Indy is devoted to equipping you with the sources you might want to construct a thriving freelance enterprise.

Streamlined dashboard: Achieve a high-level synopsis of all of your work in a single look with Indy’s built-in dashboard, which delivers cross-project insights so you may keep on prime of your to-do listing and hold all the pieces on schedule.

In contrast to different platforms that bury you in tabs, views, and notifications throughout a number of sections, Indy’s dashboard provides you a ten,000-foot perspective of the place issues stand proper now. At any given second, you’ll know your revenue this month, what invoices are overdue, which paperwork want signing, and what to work on subsequent—multi function snapshot. And, while you’re prepared to maneuver ahead with a brand new proposal, contract, bill, or process, you may add it straight from the dashboard to maintain your workload flowing.  

Job administration: Throughout the Indy platform, every of your consumer tasks will get its personal devoted workspace. Inside every mission, you’ll have areas for duties, information, invoices, and important paperwork. You possibly can add as many tasks as you want and invite your purchasers into particular workspaces for real-time collaboration by way of Indy’s built-in chat and commenting.

When it’s time to construct out an actionable roadmap, including duties is straightforward. All it’s important to do is give the duty a reputation and due date, embody a fast description if wanted, and tag it for simple filtering. You possibly can view duties in an inventory, on a Kanban board, in an interactive calendar, or sync them to your Google Calendar to remain on schedule. As a solo operator, Indy’s lack of process assignees, statuses or customized fields gained’t trouble you and helps hold the software program light-weight and simple to make use of.

Proposals, contracts, and invoices: Whether or not you employ Indy’s free or paid plan, you have got entry to over 100 lawyer-created proposal and contract templates for various kinds of freelance jobs, together with writing, improvement, and design, and customary documentation wants like NDAs and subcontractor agreements. Merely choose a template, fill within the blanks along with your mission particulars, and ship the completed doc on to your consumer for signing, all with out leaving the platform.

Creating invoices is simply as easy. All it’s important to do is enter your billing particulars, ship it to the consumer, they usually will pay proper from the bill. Plus, you may export, resend, or duplicate it with just some clicks. On this means, Indy combines the most effective elements of billing and invoicing software program with contract administration software program. Freelancers with robust model identities can change doc fonts and colours to match and Indy even provides a digital assistant (nonetheless in beta) that may generate doc sections for you in mere seconds.

Superior file sharing: Indy provides you tons of cupboard space to accommodate all of your mission paperwork, pictures, and movies. The free plan comes with 10 GB of area and the paid plan consists of a complete terabyte with no file measurement restrictions. Plus, you may manage all the pieces into folders by consumer or part of labor so yow will discover what you want straight away.

When it’s time for consumer evaluation, merely share information straight from the Indy platform. Your purchasers can then view, touch upon, and approve your work with out creating an account (and at no additional value to you). Indy additionally helps full file versioning, so that you get change monitoring and the power to revert again to earlier drafts at any time. No extra rummaging by infinite electronic mail chains or cloud storage hyperlinks to search out the appropriate model of your information.

Consumer-facing collaboration: Indy is a digital workspace inside which you and your purchasers can join in actual time, co-create collectively, and construct an ongoing dialogue. No extra chasing down approvals, infinite rounds of revisions, or miscommunications that result in missed deadlines.

Want suggestions on a brand new marketing campaign or web site prototype? Begin a dialog in Indy’s built-in chat or ship information out for approvals and suggestions. Questions come up in the midst of the week? You possibly can attain out within the mission channel or message your purchasers straight. Indy organizes all of your communications in a single place so you have got full context on each dialogue. And with @mentions, quote replies and message enhancing options, conversations stay clear and actionable, irrespective of how lengthy they change into.

Intuitive kind builder: Significant connections are the lifeblood of your freelance enterprise. With Indy’s kind builder, you get a straightforward approach to discipline work inquiries, onboard purchasers, and acquire helpful insights by suggestions.

You can begin with one among 4 templates and add single or multi-line fields, rankings, lengthy responses, or no matter else you might want to get the main points that matter. On Indy’s paid plans, you may customise the shape along with your model colours and emblem, then embed the shape straight in your web site. With its drag-and-drop performance, creating even probably the most complicated varieties is straightforward and you can also make them as lengthy or quick as you’d like. You possibly can even duplicate current varieties so that you by no means have to start out from a clean display.

With the shape builder, you may exchange your normal contact web page with a kind that syncs along with your Indy database, acquire mission particulars up entrance so that you begin with a transparent path and a mutual understanding of the work, study your purchasers’ wants, priorities and preferences, and request opinions and testimonials you should use to advertise your companies.

Automated time monitoring: As a freelancer, your time is the way you earn money. Monitoring your billable hours and the way you spend your days is crucial. With Indy, you have got built-in time monitoring accessible on each display, so you can begin and cease the clock everytime you change between duties, conferences, and consumer work. It’s also possible to add a number of time data to the identical exercise to maintain all the pieces organized.

Even in the event you neglect to start out the clock, Indy helps you to add guide time entries to account for all the hours you really labored. On the finish of the week, you’ll have a transparent view into the way you invested your hours and the way a lot of that point is billable so you may get paid correctly for the work you probably did. Plus, you may filter your time data to see the overall hours tracked for a mission, what number of of these hours have been invoiced, and what number of you have got left to invoice. For these on paid plans, attaching time data to current invoices or creating new invoices straight out of your time logs is a breeze.

Responsive dev group: Behind Indy’s intuitive and streamlined interface is a improvement group keenly targeted on constructing your supreme software program. By way of the function request portal, you have got their ear to recommend tweaks, modifications, and new options that may make your life as a freelancer simpler. Lots of of others have already piped up with their want lists, which the Indy group actively opinions, selects from, builds, and releases at a daily cadence.

For instance, on the request of almost 150 actual customers, they’re placing the ultimate touches on a consumer portal to launch later this 12 months. They’re additionally crafting mission templates with predefined repeatable duties so you may skip creating the identical to-dos each time. Each replace and new function launch makes your routine a bit of less complicated, so you may hold your focus the place it belongs.

What Indy Is Missing

Nonetheless in energetic improvement: Indy remains to be very a lot a piece in progress. That’s a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it permits for the agility so as to add new options that Indy’s customers are requesting. On the opposite, some kinks stay to be labored out.

You might discover some lacking items in comparison with different instruments, similar to consumer portals, assembly schedulers, and proposal templates. A few of these are forthcoming additions to the platform, thankfully. Newer options just like the AI assistant and automation builder are restricted proper now as a result of they’re nonetheless in beta. They might really feel clunky or overly inflexible in the intervening time, however you’ll get to assist form them into helpful instruments as you employ the Indy platform.

Should you can deal with some roughness across the edges, you’ll acquire a instrument that considerably streamlines your work. That’s supported by a group of innovators invested in making it the most effective software program for freelancers—not massive groups. Whereas established platforms could presently outshine Indy by way of the variety of options, none share its imaginative and prescient or dedication to one-person groups.

Missing cell expertise: As a freelancer, you’re going to need your consumer and process administration resolution to work on the go. Nevertheless, Indy’s iOS app hasn’t seen an replace in over a 12 months and the Android app is almost two years outdated. As a substitute of revamping their apps, Indy is specializing in enhancing their cell browser interface. Up till lately, the cell web site was read-only—you couldn’t add or change something, rendering it just about ineffective. Now you can edit some particulars on the go, however the performance is proscribed and the expertise is clunky, particularly for an app constructed for versatile freelance work.

Whereas now you can create new contacts, contracts, duties, proposals and invoices out of your cellphone, you continue to can’t view your calendar, add information, monitor time, or edit varieties. The built-in chat function can be unavailable on cell. For these wanting a streamlined, mobile-friendly approach to handle their freelance enterprise from wherever, Indy’s lack of give attention to their native apps is irritating. In fact, in the event you do most of your work from a laptop computer or desktop and solely want fundamental on-the-go performance, the cell web site could suffice.

Automations want work: The correct automations may help you massively streamline all of your work. Indy’s present capabilities on this regard are restricted. Proper now, you may’t absolutely automate a lot, as conditional logic and dynamic workflows aren’t actually an choice. As a substitute, you’re restricted to automating 1:1 actions, like routinely creating an bill when a contract is signed or producing new agreements when a proposal is accepted.

These automations can prevent time, however they’re fundamental in comparison with what different mission administration instruments can automate. The excellent news is that automations appear to be an energetic space of improvement with new settings and choices rolling out commonly. Should you solely have a couple of purchasers or are simply getting began, Indy’s restricted automations is probably not a dealbreaker. Nevertheless, when you’ve got a excessive quantity of purchasers and tasks, you’ll possible crave extra superior automation capabilities that may deal with complicated sequences.

Restricted mission administration: If superior mission planning and visibility are priorities for you, Indy could really feel restricted. There aren’t any Gantt charts, timelines, or desk views to offer you a visible illustration of your tasks. You possibly can’t assign duties to particular group members or purchasers, set process dependencies, or customise statuses, both. Granted, most of that’s extra helpful in team-based mission work.

Whilst you can add checklists to duties, they aren’t prominently seen in Indy’s interface. For complicated tasks with many shifting elements, you’ll possible need extra superior hierarchies and relationships between duties. Indy additionally lacks the deeper customization of database-driven mission administration instruments. For these requiring superior options like these, Indy’s fundamental performance could introduce extra workarounds and guide processes than precise efficiencies.

Indy Plans and Pricing

Indy retains pricing easy with two plans to select from. It’s about as easy because it will get—you may select from its free or paid variations.

The free plan locks you into three or fewer tasks, whereas the paid plan is completely limitless. Let’s get into among the extra minute variations between them.

Indy’s Free Plan

With the free model of Indy’s mission software program, you’re in a position to ship as much as three proposals, contracts, and invoices every month for free of charge. Whilst you can solely have three energetic purchasers and bill as much as $1,000 at a time, that’s sufficient to get your freelance enterprise up and working.

Think about crafting polished proposals, sealing the cope with skilled contracts, and getting paid promptly every month—all without cost.

Past the fundamentals, Indy’s free plan gives templates, an bill generator, a calendar for scheduling your time and workload, a kind builder for consumer consumption and evaluations, process administration views to arrange your work, time monitoring to invoice purchasers precisely, and 10 GB of file storage.

Whereas the free plan lacks among the options of Indy’s paid plans (like automations, integrations, customization choices, and reside assist), it provides you a style of how Indy can rework your freelancing workflow. And, while you’re able to improve, Indy provides you 20% off for all times.

For freelancers trying to manage their enterprise and receives a commission on time, Indy’s free plan is a straightforward, inexpensive place to start out.

Indy’s Professional Bundle

For less than $9 a month, you may unlock the complete energy of the Indy platform.

With it, there aren’t any restrictions. You get limitless all the pieces: proposals, contracts, invoices, purchasers, tasks, and extra. Not will it’s important to fear about maxing out your plan or turning away work. Think about the liberty of scaling your corporation with out restrictions.

Past the shortage of limitations, the Professional Bundle turbocharges your productiveness with automations, reside chat assist, embeddable varieties, calendar syncing, and 1 TB of storage for all of your information and property. Plus, you’ll be capable of begin integrating the instruments you already use with Indy by Zapier, and you may white-label your entire paperwork and varieties with your personal fonts and branding.

Whereas Indy’s free plan is ideal for launching your corporation, the Professional Bundle is constructed for development. For less than $9 a month, Indy’s Professional Bundle provides you an end-to-end enterprise administration resolution with out the excessive prices that different freelancer instruments in the marketplace sport.

Join now and get seven days to see if Indy is best for you.