Introduction
Inkvoice is an open-source, self-hosted invoicing dashboard designed for freelancers, small businesses, and anyone who wants full control over their billing workflow.
Why Inkvoice?
Most invoicing tools are either SaaS platforms that charge per invoice or self-hosted solutions that require 500MB+ of RAM. Inkvoice takes a different approach:
- 50-100MB RAM — Built on Bun with Hono (14KB) and SQLite (zero-copy native bindings)
- Single container — No separate database server, no reverse proxy, no multi-service orchestration
- Modern stack — React 19, Tailwind CSS, shadcn/ui — a clean UI without the bloat
- Full featured — Invoices, quotes, recurring billing, PDF generation, Stripe & PayPal payments, reports
Tech Stack
| Layer | Technology |
|---|---|
| Runtime | Bun |
| Backend | Hono v4 |
| Database | SQLite (bun:sqlite) |
| Frontend | React 19 + Vite 6 |
| Styling | Tailwind CSS v4 + shadcn/ui |
| Mustache HTML + browser print | |
| Templates | Mustache |
How It Works
Inkvoice is a monorepo with two packages:
packages/backend— Hono API server that handles all business logic, authentication, and serves the built frontend as static filespackages/frontend— React SPA that communicates with the backend via a typed API client
In production, Bun runs the Hono server which serves the API at /api/* and the pre-built React app for everything else. One process, one port, one container.