Invoicely: A Hiveage Rip-off

How Invoicely.com — formerly Invoiceable.com — deceived their customers and shamelessly copied the UI and UX of Hiveage

Hiveage, our online invoicing and billing software-as-a-service, has been a labor of love for our team. Thousands of hours of design and development effort has gone into making Hiveage a simple, elegant and genuinely useful tool for small businesses and freelancers. This is reflected in the feedback we receive: our customers report a 92% satisfaction rate, and 98% of them would recommend Hiveage to others.

Can you spot the difference? Hiveage (original) at the top, Invoicely (copy) at the bottom.

Hiveage is not the biggest online invoicing software out there — we only have 50,000 customers after all — but it is known to have one of the best user interfaces and user experiences among them. From the inception this has been a key factor that has set us apart from competitors like Invoiceable.

That’s why, when Invoiceable relaunched their product as Invoicely last week, we were shocked to see those familiar UIs in their product. This was no coincidence or accident: the rip-off was so complete that the localization files in Hiveage were now directly usable in Invoicely, with no changes whatsoever. As I will explain below, they even copied our bugs.

Localization is so much easier when someone else has done all the hard work: Hiveage (original) on the left, and Invoicely (copy) on the right. They dropped only Sinhala: the native language of most of our team members.

Menu

Hiveage has a main menu that reflects the idiosyncratic features we have. For example, Hiveage lists both clients and vendors in one place, so we adopted the common term connection to refer to them. Network is where these connections are listed. This connection/network nomenclature is not seen in other invoicing software, but in Invoicely, it appears as connection/connections.

Near-identical menus: Hiveage (left) and Invoicely (right)

Track is another section that is rather unique to Hiveage in the way information is presented: it’s a single place to track time, expenses and mileage. As far as I know, Invoicely is the only product that has a similar section with the same name.

And of course, with the one exception of Reports, the Invoicely menu is identical to Hiveage.

Layout

Hiveage has a layout that displays the page title at the left preceded by a breadcrumb trail, and the main call to action at the top right. Apart from some minor color changes, Invoicely has this exact layout.

Hiveage (top), Invoicely (bottom)

Typography

Invoicely replicates our typographic styles. In fact, in their CSS file, the only difference in the style rules for the body element is in the declaration for the background. They haven’t even bothered to change the default text color — a dark grey with the hex code #363B4D.

CSS style rules for the body element: Hiveage (top) and Invoicely (bottom)

Invoices, Estimates and Bills

Hiveage has a clearly identifiable, unique layout for invoices, estimates and bills (which is the same one adopted in our free invoice generator). Invoicely has copied these directly, including the workflows associated with creating, editing, changing settings, saving and sending them.

Invoice layout: Hiveage (left) and Invoicely (right)

See, for example, the invoice settings pages of Hiveage and Invoicely. They share the same layout, elements, labels, form fields and even the invoice notification email, with very similar placeholder tags.

Invoice Settings: Hiveage (left) and Invoicely (right)

And then, if you try to make an online payment for an Invoicely invoice, the screen you see is identical to that of Hiveage:

Pay online: Hiveage (left) and Invoicely (right)

Track

As I mentioned earlier, even using the label Track for time, expense and mileage tracking has been rather unique to Hiveage, though we wouldn’t have minded it at all if that were the only thing Invoicely copied from us. Instead, they went ahead and made a replica of our Track section, including minor details like the timer animation on the button.

Track time, expenses and mileage: Hiveage (left) and Invoicely

Dashboard

This blatant rip-off is vibrantly visible on the Invoicely dashboard — a Hiveage doppelgänger. They share the same layout and graphs, and most of the colors and tables.

In case you were wondering, Hiveage is on the left, and Invoicely on the right.

Multiple Businesses

A key feature of Hiveage that wasn’t available in other popular invoicing software was the ability to manage multiple businesses with a single account. Invoicely has added this feature — nothing wrong with that — but then they used the workflows and forms straight from Hiveage.

Hiveage (left) lets you add multiple businesses with a single account. Lo and behold, Invoicely (right) does the same, with an almost identical form.

Settings

Invoicely must have had a really easy time designing their settings section, because that entire part of the app is an almost word-for-word copy of Hiveage. The way we have categorized settings into subsections, and the uncommon labels we have for some of them — such as Taxes, Discounts and Shipping and Saved Categories — appear in Invoicely in the same way, in the same order.

Settings > System Preferences, in Hiveage (left) and Invoicely (right)

Localization

It’s extremely improbable for two independently developed software systems to have identical localization files. Invoicely supports the same languages that Hiveage does (except Sinhala, which is my native language); the customization options for these languages, and the specific phrases we have used (often developed with the help of Hiveage customers), are exactly the same in Invoicely as well.

Localization options, shown with Dutch: Hiveage (left) and Invoicely (right)

Bugs

Perhaps the most ridiculous example of them all is an instance where Invoicely has gone so far as to replicate a Hiveage bug.

Hiveage (top) has a style issue where the an option is shown as “Show per page X” rather than “Show X per page”. Invoicely (bottom) has blindly copied it, along with the rest of the UI.

In our pagination options we let the user decide how many records need to be shown per page. Originally this was displayed in the format of “Show X per page”. Some time ago our front-end engineer Amila made a simple mistake so that it started appearing as “Show per page X”. It was a minor glitch that didn’t affect anyone, and we never got around to fixing it.

Then Invoicely came along and copied our mistake.

Who is responsible for this mess?

The original owners/founders of Invoiceable have moved on to do other things; Invoicely, the new incarnation of Invoiceable, seems to be from Apilayer, an Austrian company with a good range of products.

I’m totally baffled as to how anyone with an iota of knowledge and experience of the Apilayer team would consider this to be a sensible business strategy. What was the plan at Invoiceable/Invoicely: launch a Hiveage clone and hope everything works out at the end?

Invoicely should understand that people trust them with their financial data because they’re perceived as a trustworthy company. By making an absolute mockery of business ethics and principles, they have insulted both their customers and their peers in the industry.

What next?

We were totally unprepared for this unsolicited flattery. I personally don’t know of a single instance where a popular SaaS product got ripped off by an established competitor. Hopefully we’ll be able to figure out a way forward by bringing this ludicrous incident to public attention. If you have any suggestions for us, please share them here or let us know at @hiveage.